A Last Post

Today, but for the virus I should have been in London preaching at Hampstead Parish Church where I was a boy chorister. It was there in the early 1960s that the journey of faith began for me, at least in a conscious way. I owe that church more than I can say.

It would have been a special occasion for me personally. Having turned 70 this year, I’d resolved to retire properly by finally stepping aside from public ministry. The Vicar had very kindly invited me to preach for the last time in the place where I first felt the stirrings of faith. It would have been, almost to the day, the forty-fifth anniversary of my ordination. So I’d intended to speak, on what would normally have been an ordination day in the church, about vocation to ministry and how the local church, knowingly or unknowingly, can foster it.

If ever there was a case of l’homme propose, Dieu dispose, the pandemic has provided it a hundredfold for all of us. ‘How do you make God laugh? Tell him of your future plans!’ I won’t get to preach that sermon now. And this blog is not it. You can’t substitute a written text or even a live-streamed online event for the real thing when it belongs to such a specific place and time.

I’d thought about asking if we could defer the event. But the symbolism of turning seventy this year felt too significant. So I reckon I’ve now preached my final sermon without realising it. That was the last time I stepped foot inside a church, just before lockdown in March. It was to mark the launch of the pilgrim Way of St Hild at the mighty church dedicated to her on the Headland at Hartlepool. With hindsight, given that the North East has played such a central part in my life, it seems appropriate that this last homily should have celebrated the region’s Christian legacy. Hild was one of the greatest and most inspiring of all the northern saints of the seventh and eighth centuries. As I said at the end of my sermon, she ‘speaks to us across the centuries of all that represents the best and noblest in human character, giftedness and service. She is a woman … to emulate as we ask ourselves what it might mean to serve God and our neighbour in whatever capacity he calls us to at just such a time as this’. What more is there to say about our Christian vocation as men and women of God?

I wrote about finally laying aside public ministry in a blog last summer. I want to reiterate that it is not a case of giving up something because it has become a burden. Still less, despite our differences, have I fallen out with the Church of England which has nurtured and, yes, cared for me all these years. I love what Anglican Christianity stands for at its wise, humane, charitable and generous best. I am profoundly grateful to have been a priest during these four and half decades. The people among whom I have lived and prayed and served, the places I’ve experienced as holy and life-giving have left indelible memories. They have been central to my formation as a priest, a Christian and a human being. They have become a part of me.

As I tried to explain in the blog, far from leaving my life’s work behind, I want to take the fruits of it into my seventies. I want to try to reflect on what it’s all meant, to go on learning while I can. So I see it not as a negative ‘giving up’ of public roles but as a positive decision to live differently in what I imagine will be my last decade of active life (if I’m spared that long). It’s as much a vocational matter as being ordained was in the first place. I’ve tried to discern it with integrity. It feels time to live as a lay person in the church again, or if you prefer (thanks to a former colleague for helping me to see it this way), to become a more contemplative priest in my last years, rather than an active one.

And because the public platform is no longer a place where I believe I should be, I’ve decided to give up blogging as well. I love writing just as I’ve loved preaching. But there comes a time when we need to recognise that later life brings with it the call to reassess the worlds we inhabit, what we do and why we do it. We each have to do this in our own way. For me at least, this entails a necessary contraction of horizons. It feels like an ‘unmaking’ which is uncomfortable at times, perhaps because it is new and unfamiliar: I always knew retirement would be significant but turning seventy has shown me that it really is one of life’s biggest rites of passage. So I need to discover how this ‘unmaking’ can also be a ‘remaking’. It’s not a case of ‘not-working’ (God forbid!) but doing ‘work’ of a different kind. This includes the openings retired people have, as physical and mental health allow, to volunteer, involve ourselves in our local communities, develop new interests, learn new skills. I want to grasp more of these opportunities.

But in retirement I’m especially thinking of the ‘heart-work’ that begins when we realise that the most basic question we can ever ask ourselves is, what does life expect of us? Or if you like, what does God ask of us? What is the work of God in the world and what is my part in it? How do I go on responding to God and to life before I die, become the best self I am capable of being? It’s a question that, like the Hound of Heaven, pursues us down the years, though we don’t always face it in our busy working lives. Retirement gives us the time and opportunity.

I think there are three parts to this ‘heart work’. First, being more present to the here and now: family, friendships, the pleasures of nature and art, the cycles of times and seasons, the goodness of ordinary things. This feels like an important aspect of ageing: you never know when you might be experiencing something for the last time. Secondly, welcoming the perspectives we gain later in life when when we can look back and recognise patterns and connections that have run through our personal histories. ‘Life must be lived forwards but understood backwards’ said Kierkegaard in words I’ve come to treasure. And thirdly, becoming more attentive to ambiguity, darkness and suffering whether I find them in the pain of the world or closer at hand in other people or in myself. Growing old has to mean embracing both the shadow and the light.

And above all, it means nurturing a sense of gratitude, loving life, and loving the God who is the source of all life and love, from whom we came and to whom we all return.

So this is my last post, my final blog. To those who’ve been kind enough to tell me they’ve enjoyed listening in on my woolgathering, I’m grateful. Where I’ve misjudged or offended, I apologise. These (nearly) ten years of blogging have been a good adventure, and I’ve been stimulated by and learned from your comments, criticisms and challenges. Thank you for being such good company.

********

PS: I’ll leave this website up for now, along with the others here and here, where you can find my sermons and addresses, and the blogs I wrote when I was in Durham. But I shall close the comments in due course.

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.

————-

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

The Ordination of Women as Priests - 25 Years On

This is one of a handful of photos that mean more to me than I can say.

It was taken at Coventry Cathedral on 11 May 1994. You will probably guess the occasion: the ordination of the first female priests in the Diocese of Coventry. And what a celebration it was! I've regularly attended glorious liturgy in no fewer than four cathedrals. But I knew on that day that this was a ceremony that would not just live on bathed in a kind of generalised afterglow. I knew that it would be unforgettable in its detail as well. Such as singing "Be still for the Spirit of the Lord is moving in this place" and, for once, truly recognising that she was.

When you are a cathedral precentor, as I was then, you train yourself to know the liturgy in all its particulars, to become familiar with the soul of it, inhabit it from the inside. Even when you have written the rite yourself, as you do on many a special occasion, you still have to learn the grain of it, intuit how it is going to "feel" in the particular liturgical space it's devised for, how the community that gathers together to celebrate is likely to respond to the words and actions, the silences and the music that you have so carefully devised for it.

We all knew that this ordination of women would be a once-for-all event, unrepeatable as a history-making act of worship. For many months I worked on the service with a small planning group of women who were due to be ordained, together with Bishop Simon Barrington-Ward and Director of Ordinands Canon, now Bishop, Mark Bryant. That preparation process was a remarkable experience in itself, both for the joy of looking forward to a great event in the life of the church and of the ordinands and their families, and for the deep sensitivity that was felt towards those who could not accept the validity of their ordination and for whom this ordination day would be one not of joy but of pain. 

I want to pay tribute to one of them in particular, Barbara Baisley who was then chaplain at Warwick University and the Dean of Women's Ministry in the Diocese. She and her husband George had both been students of mine at Salisbury (indeed, her brother Robin taught me English at school). I mention Barbara not only because of the skilled way she led those women through the delicate (and for some, highly controversial) process of becoming priests, but because she died a few years afterwards, long before her time. I also remember that a curate in the Diocese at that time by the name of Justin Welby joined the planning group in order to get a feel for how a major liturgical event is planned in a cathedral. I recall that he had his own gentle wisdom to contribute to the process.

All this was twenty-five years ago. It was in March 1994 that the first female priests were ordained in Bristol Cathedral. For those of us who had long wished and prayed for our church to take this step and had campaigned for it, the outcome of the vote in General Synod on 11 November 1992 was also a night to remember. That day, Armistice Day, is also the birthday of our youngest daughter who was nine that year. So we deferred the family fireworks that year by a few days, and as soon as Archbishop George Carey had announced the result of the vote, and we had taken it in (and shed a few tears of relief), we went out in the garden to light rockets and sparklers to celebrate what felt like a double birthday. 

As (now Archbishop) Justin Welby said this week, the contribution female priests have made to the life of the Church of England has been immeasurable. Women are now occupying every conceivable role in the church as priests: as chaplains and bishops, area deans and archdeacons, incumbents and cathedral deans. We had our ups and downs in the General Synod I was part of when it came to the question of female bishops. I won't say all that is forgotten - we mustn't airbrush out of history or our present experience the pain of those who dissent from these decisions, nor the fact that many of our sister churches have not taken these steps. My first cousin made the journey from Anglican to Roman Catholic priesthood because of the ordination of women as priests, and that made it a family as well as a church matter. Like #Brexit, you feel things in more pointed ways when they intrude upon your personal relationships. (But he and I have always remained good friends and colleagues in ministry, I'm glad to say.)

While I was taking part in that service 25 years ago, I thought back to my own memories of ordination in 1975 and 76. Ordination services have that effect on us who are deacons and priests, and it's a good thing that we're reminded of our ordination vows from time to time (even in retirement). But I had - I have - a very specific memory of the night before I was ordained deacon. Our Bishop (of Oxford - Kenneth Woollcombe) saw each of us for an hour that day. What he said to me would be imprinted on my memory for a lifetime.

The Bishop had led the campaign in General Synod that year in support of the resolution that "there are no theological objections to the ordination of women". He said to me: "Michael, you know what the Synod has resolved this year. From now on, everyone who is ordained as a deacon and thereby becomes an officer of the Church of England understands that this is the publicly stated position of our church. You must not say that the rules were changed during your public ministry. If you can't be content with that, now is the time to step back from receiving holy orders tomorrow." I imagine he said the same to all the ordinands. (But perhaps he thought I might have concerns about male "headship", trained as I was at a conservative evangelical theological college - whose last Principal, Emma Ineson, has just been ordained a bishop!). 

I've often thought back to that interview, and how influential it was, not in coming to a conclusion I'd already embraced, but in having the confidence to speak up for it publicly. It was my first experience of facing the reality of diversity in our church and learning to see it as a gift that enriches and ennobles us all. But I'm also trying to learn what Justin Welby has taught us to see as "good disagreement", how to listen carefully, practise generosity and charity alongside holding deeply to this and other matters of conviction (I'll not mention the B****t word a second time).

The Church of England still has a long way to go before it can claim to be a genuinely diverse institution. In particular, we are a long way from recognising and celebrating committed gay relationships as joyous, God-given and loving, let alone affirming and solemnising same-sex marriage - as we must, I believe, soon. Regular readers of this blog will know that I've tried to stand with my LGBT friends as they find a place of genuine, unreserved acceptance in our church. If I began to discern anywhere how we must all work tirelessly to become a more just, more equal, more caring church, it was at that marvellous ordination service in Coventry in 1994. 

Thank you to the women in the diaconate, priesthood and episcopate with whom it's been, and continues to be, such an inspiration to serve in the public ministry of the church of God. This silver anniversary brings fond memories of past ordained female friends and colleagues "who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light", "those angel faces I have loved long since and lost awhile". And to those ordained women who read these words, congratulations to each one of you. This blog comes with gratitude, admiration, prayers and expectancy for all that is yet to be in the next quarter of a century.

AMDG

*** I want to add a postscript to this blog in the light of Twitter comments it’s received so far. 

One person reminded us that it is too easy to simply celebrate  without acknowledging the cost born mostly by women. An acknowledgment of the pain caused needs to go alongside a celebration of where we have got to. It is too easy to bypass the former. Another added: true, and it still goes on. Until the Institution recognises how the barriers it has imposed inhibit the full flourishing of women’s ordained ministry the cost will continue unjustly.

I responded: Yes. I can see that for all its good intentions, this [my blog] is a man’s perspective who perhaps wants too much for it all to be well. Or wants it prematurely, before real healing has had time to happen? Or doesn’t see the injustices that are still being perpetrated in our church? I wish I’d written more sensitively in the light of this. I’m aware how much this is also true for LGBT clergy in our church. We say we intend to listen and learn from people’s experience but in practice the Church goes on “othering” those who don’t fit its theological template. The recent disinvitation of bishops’ same-sex spouses to the Lambeth Conference was a case in point (the website has now removed that offending parenthesis). Nevertheless I still want the church to rejoice with and for its women who are deacons, priests and bishops, however long the road ahead that we must continue to travel.

Seascapes: a retreat for those being ordained.

In a fortnight's time I shall be conducting a retreat for those who are being ordained deacon this summer in my home Diocese of Newcastle. They will be ordained in Newcastle Cathedral on Saturday 30 June. That's the day after the anniversary of my own ordination as a deacon in 1975. I shall give the sermon at that service. It goes without saying that I am looking forward to it. It's always a privilege to be with ordinands as they cross this crucial threshold and take up their new roles in public ministry.

The retreat will be at Alnmouth Friary on the Northumberland coast, just down the road from Alnwick where I was Vicar in the 1980s. I got to know it well at that time. Before my institution as incumbent, I spent a few days on retreat there. I made regular visits to speak with one of the senior Brothers who was a wise, kindly spiritual director. Every Friday my curate (who belonged to the Franciscan Third Order) and I would attend the midday office and eucharist there and then stay on for lunch with the Brothers. The Friary was, and still is, a real foyer, a place of warmth and hospitality.

"Thin" places where we spend times of spiritual significance often provide their own symbols and metaphors to help us reflect on whatever experience we are undergoing. I vividly remember my own priest's ordination retreat during the hot summer of 1976. I stayed with a Benedictine community, and apart from prayer times, meals and sleep (when it came), spent the entire time sitting under a lime tree in the beautiful grounds. The grass was already parched in the fierce heat, but not under that tree. There I read a lot, wrote a little, pondered much and stumbled around in my personal prayers. The community left that sunny patch of England many years ago now. I have no idea whether the tree is still there. But its shelter during those three days has remained an important grace-filled memory. It's felt like a symbol of God's care and protection, especially when the realities of public ministry kicked in as they always do eventually, and sometimes it felt hard and (here's where the metaphor of shelter is important) exposed. Like Jonah and his gourd, perhaps?

What metaphor could the Friary offer this year's candidates as they think and pray about their ordination and the lifetime of public ministry that lies ahead? It's not for me to do more than make suggestions - they must do their own search look for whatever images and symbols are there to recognise them. But an obvious one is the sea itself. What everyone loves at the Friary is the chapel which looks out on the beach at Alnmouth. At high tide you see mostly sea. At low tide, there is a broad expanse of beach, beautiful glowing sands like the ones we remember from childhood seaside holidays. Sometimes I've almost wanted to cry out in that chapel like the ancient Greeks on their long march home, ecstatic on their first sight of it: "The sea! The sea!"

The sea is the chapel altar's backdrop, its reredos if you like. Inevitably, it is always changing and this is its glory. The rhythms of the tides, the changes of weather, the alterations in the light with the ebbs and flows of the seasons - all these add their own dimension to the spirituality of the chapel where we shall gather for the daily prayers of the community and for the eucharist. Your eye is constantly drawn to what's happening out there in this magnificent seascape. It could so easily be a distraction from prayer and meditation. And I'll admit it sometimes is, the magic of what takes place when the sea meets the land. When Cuthbert created his hermitage on the Inner Farne twenty miles up the coast, he built the walls of his cell high enough to cut out the views of rock and sea - for this very reason maybe, so that he could focus more intently on God?

That's the via negativa at work, understanding the spiritual path in terms of what God is not. On the other hand, and more accessibly for most of us, we can train ourselves to try to discern where God is in what we see around us, or at least find in the world of our experience images of what God could be like. I don't mean only blue skies or glowing sunsets or cute animals or fine landscapes and seascapes, though these are all gifts of God. I mean taking in what surrounds us in all its vicissitudes: dark as well as light, storm as well as stillness, rough seas as well as calm, monochrome as well as a vibrant colour. (I've found photography to be a great teacher here in helping me not simply to see but to notice, try to see into, feel for what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the inscape - but that's for another blog.) For me the vista is a vision of the real world as if viewed through the lens of the eucharist, glimpsed as God sees it. It draws us back into its beating heart because we are learning to see not simply with our eyes but in our souls. That makes it a living icon, written by God himself.

Here, the Friary chapel can help us integrate what we see and touch and experience with how we pray. For if the reredos, this east seaward window is not to be a distraction, then it must provide us with spiritual food for thought to inform our prayer, whether corporate or personal, and our celebration of the eucharist. All of us will find our life-experience mirrored in that window from time to time, in the ever-changing conditions of land, sea and sky. Sometimes the alterations can be so subtle that we hardly notice them, like the tide creeping in over the sand on a calm day. At other times there will be dramatic changes whose suddenness takes us by surprise, as when a storm breaks unexpectedly, or a sunburst emerges out of a sullen lead-grey sky.

And if the window is a symbol of life, it is also a symbol of the tides of ordained ministry. The seascape is always changing. Sometimes those changes seem charged with promise, at other times laden with threat. As men and women in the public ministry of the church, our calling is to enter into human life in all its variety, and in God's name help people to make sense of it, even glimpse where God might be in it all. It calls for solidarity in both storm and sunshine, troubled seas and still, perilous journeys into the unknown as well as calm sea and prosperous voyage. Our new deacons have no idea of where their ministries will take them even in a few days' time, still less in the years of their lifetimes. How can they? How could I, sitting under that lime tree more than forty years ago?

But what we can and must do is offer the path ahead to God. "Lead kindly light" were words often in my thoughts as I stood in that chapel as a parish priest and pondered on my ministry in the parish a few miles inland; and even, in a highly symbolic way, "for those in peril on the sea" when things felt rough. There's a poem by William Blake, one of England's great "see-ers", that I shall quote in one of my addresses:

Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.

Those words are embroidered on a sampler the parish gave us when we said farewell. It still hangs in the room where we spend most of our daylight hours at home. They remind me of that window at the Friary and the years of stipendiary ordained ministry I have now laid down. And now, it's time for a new generation of clergy to pick up the baton in turn. I can promise them that Blake speaks the truth, not only of human life and discipleship, but of ministry too. And it's all there, in that window and in what they will recognise as they gaze into it and say their prayers and offer their lives as God's deacons.

It goes without saying that my prayers will be with them too. And with all those who are being ordained in the coming weeks in churches and cathedrals across the country.

Discerning Vocation in the Third Age: more from the retirement front line

Every now and then I try to take stock of this still new stage of life called retirement. In this blog I want to reflect on where Christian life and ordained life belong in it.

The first thing to say is that I am writing entirely personally. Every one of us has to negotiate this threshold into retirement in our own unique way. For clergy, it can be especially problematic because a vocation is so much more than the kind of job you can step in and out of. To have been a priest for more than forty years is to inhabit a way of life that forms you, shapes you, confers its own "character" on you, is intimately involved with your personal identity. As priests we "become what we are" just as we do in baptism and marriage. This is as true of our personal interior lives as well as our visible public roles. Which is as it should be.

I recall very clearly the experience of entering the priesthood as a young man. What we now call vocational discernment was accompanied by a vast amount of prayer, conversation, reflection, study and scrutiny. A great many other people were involved in helping me approach and then cross this threshold into ordained life. At that time I was in my mid-twenties and had been a student all my life up to then. Being ordained coincided, for me, with taking up my life's work, or if you like, taking responsibility and earning my own living. It felt like a rite of passage into adulthood.

At around the time I turned sixty, memories of that earlier vocational journey became much more vivid. I knew I had four or five years in which to prepare for retirement (not long in the sweep of a lifetime). There were inevitable practicalities to think about. Where would we live? What were our housing needs likely to be? What financial resources would we have? (I learned from older clergy who'd come to me for regular spiritual guidance that it's never too soon to ask these questions, and in today's less certain economic climate, the earlier the better.)

But I wasn't expecting these pre-retirement years to prove once again to be a time of vocational discernment. But that is precisely what they turned out to be. At the end of those four decades of ordained work, and now as an older if not wiser man, I found that the prospect of leaving stipendiary ministry felt remarkably similar to my memories of entering it. In other words, both seemed to have discernment at their heart. I found that for me, retiring was as much of a vocational issue as ordination had been. So it's important that the church "accompanies" its retiring clergy spiritually and emotionally because as every retired person knows, it's one of the biggest thresholds we ever have to cross in our adult lives. I think we are getting better at this, and that's heartening.

Discovering who we are in retirement and what we could become is a journey, of course. I am not even in media res. As yet, if I'm spared for a while, I am probably nearer the start than the finishing line. I have a lot to learn. But for what it's worth, here's my interim report on where I'm getting to.

For me (and again I stress that this is just one person speaking), I did not feel in my waters that retirement ministry could simply mean more of the same: taking services, preaching sermons, continuing in some form or other to participate in the church's public leadership. As I started to think and pray about it, I came to see how the coming years could offer all kinds of new and untried opportunities to contribute to both the church and the wider community. Some of these I have explored and begun to embrace. Some are as yet simply possibilities to be thought about. One or two have not led anywhere. But pushing at a few doors and testing volunteering opportunities has felt very much to be the stuff of discernment. I've wanted to discover if, and how, these different conversations might coalesce into a single answer to the question, "what could my life now become, what does God want it to become as I embrace the potential that comes from being released from day to day work responsibilities?"

At the core of this new vocation, and rather to my surprise, there emerged more and more insistently a desire to live and worship as a lay person once again. I mean that I wanted to play my part as a Christian not through preaching and presiding at the liturgy but as a worshipper, sitting with my wife in a church nave among the laos, the people of God. This isn't a nostalgic harking back to the first year of our marriage when this was what "churchgoing" meant. But it is to rediscover as a couple this communio in sacris, a "sharing in holy things". I'm one of those strange clergy who has always enjoyed churchgoing (even on holiday!). It's been good to find ourselves once again in that place of community where the holy-common people of God gather. I know that has always been true, whatever my role as a deacon and priest in the church. But to experience it in this new (i.e. old) way on the Sundays of our lives feels like one of the best gifts of retirement.

We are fortunate that in this village, our parish priest understands this and allows me to live out my vocation in this way. I've made it clear that if there is a need, and especially an emergency, I shall of course step up at once and help along with other retired clergy colleagues in the parish. I value the invitations to take part in special services and preach in and beyond the diocese when an invitation comes. I have the Bishop's permission to officiate. But if asked why I am comparatively rarely to be seen in a surplice or a chasuble, I try to give as honest an answer as I can along the lines I've explained. And I find that people not only understand what I'm struggling to articulate, but respect it.

What does this say about vocation at this stage of life? There's an important theological principle that I've needed to revisit. It is that the fundamental vocation of every Christian is conferred at baptism. For some of us, ordination flows out of that vocation to discipleship as a consequence. But I'm clear that the "normal" way of being a Christian and a member of God's church is the lay state. Deacons, priests and bishops do not renounce their lay-ness on ordination (nor the orders that have already been conferred on them). All the ordained continue to belong to the laos. I think it's not only good but important for us to express this from time to time. For me, retirement is - for the moment anyway - such a time.

I'm aware that this could be misunderstood. (I also recognise that other retired clergy will see it differently, and of course I respect that.) It may sound as though I have renounced my orders - as if it were possible to renounce an indelible "character" conferred by the church at ordination. Or that I am no longer interested in playing my part in helping the church to flourish. Or perhaps that I'm just not aware of the pressures local churches are familiar with through the relentless decline in the numbers of stipendiary clergy. None of these is true - but maybe it needs explaining.

(Excursus. I happen to think that our present patterns of church life, especially in the countryside, are not likely to prove sustainable beyond a few more decades, and the generosity of retired clergy should not protect the church and its dioceses, bishops and archdeacons from recognising that reality and engaging with it. I know they are already doing so. I am simply suggesting that the future of organised religion will look very different from the past, and one day there will not be enough clergy whether stipendiary or non-stipendiary, active or retired to maintain it in something like its present form. I say this with deep sadness because I believe with all my heart in parochial ministry and am uneasy that others, including some in senior leadership roles, seem to sit more lightly to it than I believe is good for the national church and the people it is here to serve.)

My response is to say that I am trying to re-express the lay aspect of my baptismal vocation - or, if you like, to live as a priest in the local church in a new kind of way. I am glad to be alongside so many good lay people in this parish who give such time and effort to supporting it. It makes me appreciate all the more how much all the cathedrals I served benefitted from our teams of volunteers. No cathedral, no parish, will go anywhere nowadays without its committed lay people. Now that I largely live as one, I see this more from the inside than I used to.

At the same time, I am glad to go across to the church on weekdays to pray the daily office with the vicar. I hope that by doing this I can offer him spiritual companionship. Reciting the psalms, hearing the scriptures read, offering intercession for parish, church and world all connect me in a deep way with the whole church and my own priesthood within it. All of this is what we call the opus dei, the work of God. Whatever form our ministry takes, whether as laity or clergy, it's our privilege to bear witness to the reality of God and do his work in the world.

How we undertake this, for people of faith, is the question that matters at every stage of life. In retirement, it's good to report that it still gets me up in the morning.

**These images are all taken in the Benefice of Haydon Bridge, Beltingham and Henshaw in Northumberland where we have made our home in retirement. Maybe there are appropriate metaphors in some of them?

At the End of the Year

New Year's Eve marks a threshold for everyone who feels the flow of time. For me, saying farewell to 2015 means the end of an entire era of my life. For this is my final day on the Church of England payroll as a stipendiary priest. Tomorrow I throw myself on the mercy of the Pensions Board. In twenty four hours' time I shall be indisputably, officially, legally retired.

Readers of the Decanal Woolgatherer blog will know that I left Durham Cathedral at the end of September. Since then I have been on sabbatical leave while officially remaining the Dean. The idea was to spend three months in reflection and prayer. I wanted to look back over my forty years of active ministry to draw threads together and find meanings. I wanted to prepare for a very different future, try to think about how to be 'retired'. I wanted to be present to what everyone agrees is a big life-change, perhaps the biggest since setting out on the journey of adulthood, getting married and starting work. 

Well, reality is not always what we expect or hope for. Woody Allen famously quipped: 'How do you make God laugh? Tell him your future plans'. We knew it would take time to settle into a new home and feel we belonged to the Northumberland village where we have come to live. In these far northern lands, the shepherds talk about sheep being 'hefted' on to their hill, that is, berthed in and bonded with their native soil. Maybe offcomers like us who have been blown in from somewhere else can never expect to be fully hefted. There will always be something of the exile in a quondam Londoner like me, even one who is lucky enough to have landed in a beautiful village like ours with a great sense of community.

But as some of you know, recent events have had their own way of contributing to our 'hefting' a lot more speedily than we had predicted. Barely two months into our new home and life, at the beginning of Advent Storm Desmond hit. The house (appropriately named after a collier ship that capsized in the North Sea) began taking in water. Lots of it. We can tell a long story about the drowning of our newly installed biomass boiler in the cellar: I blogged about the floods at the time. Suffice it to say that this village has been marvellously kind and supportive. We have made new friends and got to know our neighbours. This drama helped us more than anything else could have done to 'arrive' in the village and feel part of it. Already, we can't imagine living anywhere else. It's good to be able to say that.

I had decided to keep a journal for the six months before leaving Durham and the six months afterwards. It's been an important way of logging this experience of transition. When you retire, you lay aside a role you've inhabited for years, maybe (as in my case) your entire working life. For me, coming to the end of my service at the Cathedral has been to say goodbye not only to my dozen Durham years but to forty years of stipendiary ministry as a priest. As a family we've learned a bit about leave-taking as we've moved from one place to another in that time. It doesn't get any easier, however practised you are. There's always the painful business of having to say farewells to people you have come to love, leaving a community where you've been contented and fulfilled (if you're lucky enough), packing up your possessions and walking away from your physical home and the environment where you have flourished, felt at ease and been happy. 

Every priest knows that this is the deal. And every retiring priest has known that it was going to happen again, but this time in a uniquely final way. We clergy are well looked after by the Church in retirement. Yet there is still the unnerving sense that somehow, this is it. We are on our own now, responsible for our futures, responsible for the lives we choose to live, and responsible for this house we live in, not the tied accommodation we have enjoyed all these years but our very own property in which we have invested our savings. This sense of being on our own has hit home quite sharply, thanks to December's events. When the cellar floods, the power goes off and the water runs cold, there is no Clerk of Works or Parsonage Board to sort it out for you. But I guess it's good for us. Maybe retirement is the last but one event in the process of growing up (the last step of all being death?).

But we're also on our own in the more profound sense that there are far fewer external demands to control our decisions and priorities. So we are discovering how retirement is about a new experience of time spent together, sitting alongside each other in our local church at the Sunday service, learning how to pray together again. It's a bit how it was when we were first married, before I was ordained. Sabbatical time even had an odd whiff of honeymoon about it to begin with, though the flood rather exploded that perspective. But whatever our circumstances, there are no rules in retirement. We have to reinvent ourselves, develop new rhythms and disciplines, a new spirituality to shape the third age and help us to grow old gracefully. This is what I've tried to think and write honestly about in my journal.

In 2016 reality will kick in. I'm not under any illusions about the challenges it could bring. But part of my reason for asking for sabbatical time before officially retiring was to ask myself some key questions about the future. What are my personal priorities going to be? How am I going to try to be useful to the church and the wider community in Northumberland, maybe beyond? What will it mean, and how will it feel after all these years now to find myself a 'retired priest'? What is expected or asked of me in that capacity? What projects and pursuits might I take up in the next few years, whether in a public way through taking up volunteering roles, or more personally in writing, photography, music-making, walking, reading, travel and other enjoyments where I have longed for more time and have new discoveries to make? 

When the midnight hour strikes tonight, we shall be on Haydon's old bridge over the Tyne (troubled water in recent weeks) enjoying the annual village firework display and party. It's a highly symbolic place at which to mark a threshold in time, a crossing-over, as a commentator on this blog points out. We shall all in different ways be thinking about those many for whom 2015 has brought endless trouble, disaster and pain, including people we know who will be relieved to see the back of the past year. But we shall also remind ourselves, I hope, of all that is lovely and good in life, all that has enriched the past year for us, particularly in the people who love us. And in my own case, these past forty privileged years that come to an end in the coming hours.

And if the world is looking pretty desperate as we link arms and sing Auld Lang Syne, faith gives us every reason not to lose heart. We can cross tonight's threshold with a song in our hearts that's not simply wishful thinking. I'm looking forward to 2016 and discovering the doors it will open and the possibilities that lie beyond their portals. Whatever you are hoping for or afraid of in the coming twelve months, whatever the changes and chances you face, I want to wish you as personally as I can a good new year. I pray that it will be a time of gifts for those in our world who most need them. I pray that for all of us, as Pope Francis is reminding us, it will be a true Year of Mercy.