A new stage of life

 

Each Blog post obviously simply involves selecting an image and preparing a text.  Not in itself the most demanding thing in the middle of full-time work.  Something I did on average a couple of times a week over sixteen years. 

But it has proved surprisingly difficult to fit it into the ‘time off’ from a half-time job over the last eighteen months.  So much so that productivity has ceased. 

I’ve missed thinking through some of the things which strike me.  Even more, I have missed being able to return to the record of them.  This has always been more a notebook for myself than a newsletter for any others who might happen to look over my shoulder.

What is now my eighteen month licence as a priest supporting Grimsby Minster parish lasts until the end of this month, and the newly appointed full-time Vicar will come into post in the next few weeks.  It remains to be seen whether the old blogging pattern will resume after that. 

This actual post only comes because yesterday evening the impending storm led to the cancellation of my train north.  I now have three clear days when I was to be away to visit friends in Northumberland.

The carefully managed dislocation between thirty-seven years of stipendiary ministry and whatever priestly ministry was to follow was well aided by a compulsory gap of six months without a licence or any permission to officiate at all.

I thought I saw the point that those of us whose only experience of church membership over many years had been to have a measure of control, even when the ‘control’ is that of promoting collaboration.  We needed to get used to having no role at all before something quite different and supportive could have any chance of emerging.

Being called back for eighteen months into a role involving a level of strategic leadership has rather wrecked that, and I suspect that the dislocation will be harder a second time around.

I think I am beginning to see a deeper point.  Habitual delivery of ministry can be at the cost of the development of personal discipleship.  However much one guards against it, the obvious example is too often asking not so much ‘how do this Sunday’s readings cut into me?’ as ‘what shall I say about them?’. 

This isn’t just personal.  I’ve long been aware of the dangers involved in having to focus on the viability and growth of the church (business plan, fabric financing, mission statement, essential safeguarding) at the cost of, well, kingdom-seeking.  This just seems so much acute in the modern church.

The weighed down pilgrim is from John Bunyan’s grave visited last month.  The burden (which wasn't the reason to choose the image) did fall off.

40 years on

 

We celebrated in Lincoln Cathedral on Saturday thirty years since the first ordination of women as priests there.  I’m not quite sure why the Pentecost and Trinity Sunday ordinations in 1994 (there were so many candidates that we had two services in successive weeks, first for the long established female ministers, then for the relatively new ones) were only now being commemorated in September.

One of the three ordaining Bishops was there and reminded me that even in the 1970s the then Bishop of Lincoln was licensing a lay woman to take charge of a parish (with priestly support on a Sunday) and praying with the Movement for the Ordination of Women protesters outside the Cathedral before each ordination he conducted.

So the pattern was well established when I came to a first incumbency in Scunthorpe in the diocese in 1989 and almost immediately a woman deacon came to villages nearby as Deacon-in-Charge.  She was among those ordained priest at those first services five years later, and she was there on Saturday among quite a number of that first Lincoln batch.

The main oddity about the thirtieth anniversary service was how small scale it was; the first ordinations packed the large nave twice over, the anniversary service did not fill the choir.  Quite a number of robed female priests were in the procession, but only a handful of male ones.

And the following day was the anniversary of my own ordination as a priest, Michaelmas Day falling on a Sunday in 2024 as it had done in 1985.  I preached on Jacob’s ladder, and the idea that his claim ‘God is in this place, this is none other than the house of God (Beth-el), this is the gate of heaven’ might as appropriately be carved, etched or written on the inside of church doors to be read going out as on the outside to be read going in.

And, a day later, today is the fortieth anniversary of my first being ordained - a new deacon ready to be ordained priest a year later, unlike those being made deaconess at the same service.  Having first been licensed as a Curate that day in 1984, I’m still enjoying the serendipity which I've mentioned before of having been so licensed (albeit with a short-term half-time licence) again in 2024.

Meanwhile, the art installation in the Cathedral is of paper doves, on each of which someone had written a prayer for peace.

Three months further on

So, three months ago, I wrote

Working... in a parish thirty-five miles drive from home sometimes feels a foolhardy endeavour, especially when any particular request threatens to tip me beyond the ‘half-time’ limits set.  But actually the only real casualties so far has been the habit of blogging and any diligence in house cleaning. 

Which remains true.  

I’m not quite sure why the discipline of shaping and preserving an idea by making it a blog post length reflection and making an often-enough gesture towards a less dusty environment should be the things which feel most days like taking a step-too-far, but there it still is.

It may, of course, be age.  It was in 2019 that I was first offered a seat on a crowded train (between Naples and Pompeii); I wasn’t even 60.  It was in 2021 than I realised I’d lost the energy to work full time and look after a large house and garden; it was time to retire early.

My report is that last week, sitting in a back-row stall during Cathedral Evensong, I heard the opening of the second reading, and woke for the Gloria at the end of the Nunc Dimittis.  Only a brief doze, but another first.

Meanwhile, here is a picture taken after Matins in Grimsby Minster last week too.

Use of half-times

 

Working for the last eleven weeks half-time in a parish thirty-five miles drive from home sometimes feels a foolhardy endeavour, especially when any particular request threatens to tip me beyond the ‘half-time’ limits set.  But actually the only real casualties so far has been the habit of blogging and any diligence in house cleaning. 

The retirement focus I had discovered (on random bits of research and sharing) has survived, squeezed into the corners of my remaining half-time, culminating on a single recent extended weekend when I found myself both checking proofs for an article (not something I’d ever done before) for Brontë Studies and leading my assessed tour to qualify as a Cathedral Guide.

So here are poor photos of objects newly displayed at the Lincoln Museum and the Usher Gallery next door to each other and a short walk from my home.  The Roman dodecahedron, excavated not far away at Norton Disney, has been a national sensation.  Local student Nimra Qayyum’s Echoes of Exodus, Loss and Longing is rooted in the 1947 Indo-Pak separation, and deserves equal attention.

Community trusting the church

 

I was a little wary of some wellbeing provision locally.  How could I tell if it was mainstream or wacky?  Especially as it didn’t display on its website any badges of affiliation to any respectable professional organisation.  As it happens, its counsellors were all so trained and affiliated.

It turned out they were more suspicious of me, and of the church I was representing.  How could they know I wasn’t going to, say, promote gay conversion therapy, or subvert its nonjudgmental commitment to its clients in some other way?  After all, I had no initials after my name indicating my membership of a suitable professional body, and there are no badges on the church’s website which would indicate we are safe to be around.

Meanwhile, I saw a fresh plank of oak in the Cathedral’s workshop the other day, being told it was destined to extend the desk in front of the new Canon Missioner’s stall.  In no time it appeared unstained, carved exactly to match the desk in front of the neighbouring stall.  And yesterday, although there is no third picture to show it, it was stained so that it now nobody would think it wasn’t always there.