Morning Rounds and Evening Musings

I'm reading Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church right now, and am finding so many points of resonance between her story and my own. She studied religion and went to seminary because that's what you do when you're "drawn to God"--you go where other people feel like that too. With no intention of being ordained, she went to Yale, and after church-hopping, was confirmed in the Episcopal church. She did her field work at St. Luke's, which is where she thought of being a priest for the first time as she walked the processional each Sunday, and mingled with priests in the vesting room. Of course, there were people who warned her against it:

"Think hard before you do this," one said to me when I told him I wanted to be ordained. "Right now, you have the broadest ministry imaginable. As a layperson, you cna serve God no matter what you do for a living, and you cna reach out to people who will never set foot inside a church. Once you are ordained, that is going to change. Every layer of responsibility you add is going to narrow your ministry, so think hard before you choose a smaller box"

But none of that deterred her because she felt such a strong draw to be the hands behind the altar rail, not in front of it, and to do her part to patch the brokenness she saw around her. Her reflections of her 20 plus years of ministry as a priest, both in a large, urban downtown church with which I am very familiar, and a small, rural one in N. Georgia are beautiful and captivating and make the priesthood seem romantic and unique even in the mundane tasks of sending out the bulletin and receiving an angry phone call from a parishioner whose name she spelled wrong:

"The ancient word priest cpatures the risk of this vocation as well as any word I know. In my lexicon at least, a priest is someone willing to to stand between a God and a people who are longing for one another's love, turning back and forth between them with no hope of tending either as well as each deserves. To be a priest is to serve a God who never stops calling people to do more justice and love more mercy, and simultaneously to serve people who nine times out of then are just looking for a safe place to rest. To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are. To be a priest is to suspect there is always something more urgent that you should be doing, no matter what you are doing, and to make peace with the fact that the work will never get done."

Ultimately, the priesthood wore her out, and she went back to teaching theology. I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet, so I don't know her thoughts on it, but I think I have much to learn from her journey.

"When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, she said that she had been prepared all her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better and teh best--and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out. I thought of her often as my time ran out each day. I spent a great deal of time trying to be good, but was good the same as whole? I never lay in the grass anymore..."

I had lunch with my two supervisors from St. Luke's yesterday, and they said that discernment is not choosing between this option and that one. It is looking at one option, saying yes or no before moving to another. A list of pros or cons ultimately falls flat when it comes to decisions like these. The question is not, "should I be a priest or teach or work in non-profit?" the question is "Should I be a priest, yes or no?" And then move on from there. I thought that was helpful, because at some level this is a choice between good, better or best--and knowing that I can serve God anywhere means there is no 'wrong' decision. God calls me to be his. That is all.