Called to the Priesthood, Called to be Lay

In one sense, there’s nothing provocative about that title. When we are ordained deacon, priest or bishop, we don’t cease to be members of the laos, the community of the baptised, the holy common people of God. I’ve been a lay person all my Christian life. That’s been fundamental to my vocation as a priest. The priesthood has been how my obedience to the call of my baptism has been shaped for nearly half a century.

Discerning our vocation is something we all need to do as people of faith. Often it’s far from straightforward. If only there could be Damascene moments that clearly pointed to the destined path ahead! But as we know, life is not usually like that. It can take years to recognise and respond to the call of God to take some particular direction in life. That call may at first have been no more than a whisper amid the babble of voices that competed for our attention. It almost certainly took a lot of listening, and prayer, and the accompaniment of wise, experienced friends before we were ready to say yes, even tentatively.

In my own case, it was about seven years from beginning to explore the possibility of ordination to standing before a bishop on my ordination day. How tentative those words are sounding now that I look back on the experience 44 years later! Beginning, explore, possibility. But I like words like those. They are provisional and don’t claim more than they should. Before we can rise up with confident wings like eagles, or run and not be weary, we need to learn to walk and not faint, to borrow an image from the Book of Isaiah (40.31). We need to discover how to feel our way more slowly, in God’s time and at his pace.

I think retirement is like this because it entails reimagining life in a wholly new way. You have to ask the question, what does God want me to become, and to do, here, now, in this stage of life we’re learning to call the third age? I’ve blogged on this before here, and here, and here. It’s a work in progress as I keep saying. Each time I write about it, there is something new to say about how “inhabiting” retirement is working out in the lived experience of it. And just as the journey of entering stipendiary ministry to begin with took years, so leaving it is also a journey of years, not months or days. Even if it looked as though you were working one Sunday and on the Monday morning you woke up and lo! you had retired!

I blogged a while ago about exploring vocation in the third age. I’ve since become much clearer about this. I’ve reached a (possibly startling?) conclusion that’s implied by the title of this blog even if it’s the less obvious reading. It is this: that just as I was once called to the priesthood and gladly gave my working life to fulfilling that vocation in the best way I knew how, I now discern an equally insistent call to live as a lay person once again. 

What do I mean by that?

Simply, that my way of serving God in the world and in the church will no longer be as an ordained man in public ministry. I no longer see myself called to preside at the eucharist, conduct baptisms, weddings and funerals, preach sermons, give lectures or lead retreats and quiet days. I’ve loved doing all these things and regard them as among the most privileged kinds of ministry anyone could undertake. I’ve also been immensely fortunate in living and working as a priest in beautiful environments surrounded by wonderful communities and colleagues. As I look back on my career as a curate, a theological educator, a parish priest, a cathedral canon and as a dean in two dioceses, I realise how much I have to be thankful for.

But now in retirement, the time has come to lay all this aside. I need to hand on the baton to the next generation of clergy (in whom, I’m glad to say, I have complete confidence). This decision doesn’t reflect any regret or negativity on my part. I may sometimes be grumpy with the Church of England that I serve (who isn’t?), but there is no falling out, no crisis, no parting of friends. I feel wholly positive, even excited, about renegotiating life on a new set of terms. It will open up opportunities for discovering, I hope, a different quality of life in which there will being more time for  family and friendship as well as volunteering, travel and recreation, and, I hope, productive writing. And of course to understand and make my own the spirituality of growing old. I shall continue to serve on the church committees I’m currently a member of. I intend to go on seeing clergy and ordinands for mentoring and spiritual accompaniment for as long as they want me to.  I shall go  on trying to  support the parish and diocese in whatever way I can.

I suggested in my last blog that this was the way things seemed to be leading. But I admit to being deeply influenced by watching the TV documentary about the mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker a few months ago. I wrote about this at the time. She made the courageous decision in her 50s to say farewell to her career in opera, and a few years later, to lay aside her recital and recording activity as well. She was at the height of her powers, and was being followed by an adoring public. In her book Full Circle, she chronicled her final year on the operatic stage and offered insights into what it was like to know that so much of her music-making was for the last time. Of retirement she said that it wasn’t about leaving a life behind so much as engaging with it more fully, in a more wholesome way. There was work to be done at that stage of life that she did not want to neglect. Human work. Heart work. The work of love. I warmed greatly to that way of putting it.

The fact that I turn seventy next Easter has concentrated the mind. I am no Janet Baker (if only!) but the human and spiritual issues feel similar: the need to change direction, the need to pay attention to matters I’ve neglected thus far. There is a time to speak and a time to be silent, says the preacher in Ecclesiastes. My time to fall silent in public ministry is coming. I won’t pretend it’s not hard, at times, to contemplate it. But it’s what my discernment  process late in life has brought me to recognise should happen.

I admit that I’m haunted by the ontology. Once a priest, always a priest. That character (as it’s called in catholic theology) is indelible. So what does it mean to lay aside the practice of priesthood, hold the order but not exercise it? I don’t know, yet. But I do know that there would inevitably come a time when old age or illness or disability would mean facing this question in any case. In my seventieth year, stamina is not what it once was. Hundreds of clergy are forced by circumstance to lay aside the exercise of their priesthood, and most do it with grace and dignity. If my discernment leads me to take this step in a more intentional way, anticipate the endgame so to speak, it’s no different in principle. And as I’ve said, living out a lay vocation in the service of God and neighbour is not pretence or play-acting. It’s what I already am and have always been.

I wrote to the Bishop of Newcastle, the Diocese in which I was once an incumbent and where we live in retirement, to outline my thinking. I hold her permission to officiate (PTO) so she had a right to know. She asked to see me so that I could explain more fully. It was a good meeting, not least because it helped to have to put inchoate thoughts into words in the presence of a kind and  sympathetic - but shrewd - listener. “It feels a bit all or nothing” she remarked. Maybe. But when you arrive at a crossroads, for whatever reason, you have to make a choice. So we reached a settlement. The deal was that I would not send her back my PTO. Not yet, anyway. “You never know” she said. True. I might need to come out of retirement to help in an emergency at the vicarage across the road. I might be asked to preside at a family rite of passage. I’ve promised to preach at the funerals of a former churchwarden and of my closest friend if they die before me. I suppose a clean ending would have pandered to my tidy mind. But instinct tells me that the Bishop was right.

Nevertheless, I am now entering the home stretch of what I’m calling my formal public ministry. I have preaching commitments during the coming months that I need to honour, including during Holy Week next year. These engagements will be all the more precious because they will be among the last I undertake. And then?

Greatly daring, I wrote to the incumbent of the church where I became a chorister at the age of eleven. In that place, the whole Christian journey began for me. What I owe it is incalculable. So I wondered whether I might recognise the part that church and its people and music had played in my life and say thank you. It’s not that I want to make an event out of preaching “for the last time”. Simply that I would love to share something of my Christian and vocational story with the community where the seed was first planted all those years ago. He has been generous enough to welcome that idea. So some time next year, aged three score years and ten, I’ll have the chance to acknowledge the debt. And in my inmost self, say farewell to a ministry that has meant everything to me. And always will.

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Here’s a link to a recent feature in the Church Times that’s relevant to this blog.

Growing Old Gracefully

This week I'm taking part in a 24 hour event for clergy who are coming up to retirement. So here's another in a series of occasional blogs on retirement "from the front line". This one's about growing old.

And it's trending nowadays. We baby boomers are about to add to the pressure on our struggling health and social care provision. My generation was born just after the last war. We're getting to the age when we're going to need looking-after in the last years, even decades, of our lives. Some have already reached that difficult turning-point in life where we can't go on without the help of others, whether we're wholly or partly dependent on family, friends, neighbours or social welfare.

The trouble is, we are living too long, a lot longer than was imagined in the 1940s and 50s when I was born. And this at a time when healthcare expectations and the strains on our public finances are greater than they have ever been. Many of us retired people in the so-called "third age" enjoy a quality of life that compared to most others across the world is altogether extraordinary. We look at people like Cliff Richard in his seventies and Joan Collins in her eighties, and can't quite believe they aren't still in middle age. (Perhaps they think they are!) Even at this modest age of sixty eight, I occasionally get told off for pretending to be older than I really am, old enough to be retired.

Well, most of us last played that game of pretending when we were kids, trying to get in to watch "A" films at the local cinema. Or worse... I can see you're worried. Let me reassure you. It was nothing salacious, but I was underage, eleven probably, when I went to see Whisky Galore after school one day with a friend. How grown-up it felt! (Who was that friend? I wish I could remember. Another symptom of ageing, that...)

"Be your age" we used to scold our children. But of course that's precisely the point about how ageing tends to be viewed in western society. "You're as old as you feel" we're told; "sixty is the new forty. Welcome to middle age." And while I get impatient with that kind of talk, there's some truth in it. We don't really feel our calendar age. My consciousness of being "me" tells me that I'm fundamentally the same person as I was a lot earlier in life. Inside, I feel I be back at school again, or getting married, or starting my working life, or having children. And a lot else. Use your imagination. It's when bits drop off my body and its parts start to fail or stamina falls off that I'm reminded where I am on this timeline of being, not Adrian Mole aged thirteen and three quarters, but Michael, now fast approaching seventy. It can feel hard at times.

But why should it be hard to admit that? It's a very western problem to see growing old in this nostalgic regretful way. Most other cultures respect the old. The Japanese even have a special "day of the elderly". Yes, we should look back and be thankful for all the good things that have happened to us in youth and middle-age, all that has blessed and enriched us, fulfilled us and made us glad to be alive. Thankful too for the capacity to recognise our mistakes, say sorry and try to put them right, or at least live well with memories that will always be sad or painful or dark. And especially I am trying to be thankful for God's inestimable love, as the General Thanksgiving in the Book of Common Prayer puts it, God's constant presence and care from first breath to last, whether I knew it or not. If being human means lifelong learning, then no experience we've undergone is ever wasted.  Yes, there's a lot that's been lost, and most of all the people who have loved us and have died. But "all in the end is harvest". Loss is real, but the memories of cherished souls still touch my life and continue to make me what I am.

I've just read a rather wonderful book by Lynne Segal, Out of Time: the Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. She writes with insight about the ambiguities of growing old, and how the elderly are perceived in our society, especially by the young. We comfortable baby boomers who "never had it so good" are, she observes, increasingly resented by young and middle-aged people who struggle with unemployment, lack of opportunity, poverty, poor (or no) housing and the near-collapse of proper social welfare. By contrast, as some see it, baby-boomers' self-interest has begotten consumerism with all its ills, caused financial mayhem across the planet and has continued to plunder the world's resources when we should have known better. Add to that (too late for the book) how the young regard the silver-haired generation who have stolen their future from them by voting so decisively for a Brexit they (the young) do not understand or want.

Segal recognises that there's caricature in some of this. When has any generation not scorned or blamed their forebears for the predicaments they find themselves in. And yet... I know as we all do, so many inspirational young people who want to make the world a better place and find common cause with my contemporaries who want the same thing. Self-interest is not, I think, age-specific. I'm always heartened by that saying in the Rule of St Benedict about how we need to listen to the young, for God often tells them things he withholds from those who are older but not necessarily wiser.

The book urges me to be honest and realistic as I answer the question, "how old are you?" And that's about much more than what I'm feeling. Having read it, I now want to respond as truthfully as I can and acknowledge what belongs to the age I am rather than five, ten or twenty years younger. There's dignity in that, especially when it includes facing up to our physical or mental deterioration, our dwindling beauty or attractiveness, our sexual prowess or athletic ability. It isn't always easy to own up to. We can long to recapture those first, fine careless raptures wherever, whatever they were. In one way or another, we can devote all our lives to that attempt to re-set ourselves to some point in the past.

In the end, though, it's a futile quest. We are mortal. We know that one day we shall die, even if we pretend (back to that word again) that we can sit out the summons to join in the dance of death. When I laid down my work as a stipendiary priest, I wondered whether retirement might prove to be the last really big rite of passage of my life until either my wife or I myself died - a portentous thought to concentrate the mind. But more gently, ancient wisdom invites us to cultivate the art of living well in the time that we have left, to make old age a true summing-up of all that we've tried to be in life. Paradoxically, as we contemplate death, far from finding it a depressing or sinister thought, we discover that perhaps it's the clue to embracing life in all its fulness and living joyfully in our old age. Read the great seventeenth century classics of spiritual writing, Bishop Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying and Holy Living if you don't believe me.

Late in life, I'm trying harder to celebrate the miracle that I am "alive, alive-oh" to quote the title of a book by that doughty writer on old age, Diana Athill. I don't mean anything dramatic, simply learning how to be more present to being alive, how to pay more attention. To live contemplatively and thankfully in the present tense is truly transformative. And that's also to recognise the past and future tenses of ageing, how grace has brought me thus far, and how, I trust, it will lead me home.

I realise (how can I not?) that "old age is not for wimps". It takes courage to peer into the possible futures that could await us in this adventure of growing old. Some of them could be bleak indeed. The spiritual question I live with is, how do I keep alive the sense of God, whatever may happen? When it gets hard, I so want still to be able to sing alleluia. But even if courage fails in whatever ordeals may await, I hope I shall always hear that still small voice calling to me deep down, and be able to whisper back: For all that has been, thanks! To all that shall be, Yes!