Ordinary 15

The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 55:10-11; Psalm 65; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

During the last few months have you come to feel scattered? Unmoored? Not depressed, just drifting?

I do.

Obviously we have not gathered as a community. I don’t see friends much or if I do it is in passing or in some artificial manner. There has been no contact from the diocese except for emails and emails and more emails and yet not knowing what kind of support I’d would be looking for anyway. The area parishes don’t communicate. We are isolated. The daily routine has been set aside for new patterns of living that don’t fit.

Unmoored.

My days are filled; reading, playing the piano again, walking, learning two languages on my Android. Yes, I went to the “dark side” of technology. Days are full but… It’s the but that expresses it all.

I’ve not stood at an altar since the Third Sunday of Lent and oddly don’t seem to miss it. Canon law, custom and practice dictate a priest must have the minimum of one person to celebrate Mass. And so, I refuse to stand at an altar by myself without the People of God. That makes no sense to me and is an impoverished understanding of the Eucharist and priesthood. A priest alone at an altar? An image that to me smacks of magic. Yet I remain a priest but… There’s that word again, but…

How often do many of us confuse our roles as parent, teacher, coach, clergy, with who we are as a person? Before I was ordained a priest I have always been David. My self-image is not priest but a person who was and is prior to priesthood, prior to being a musician, prior to being a teacher. They colour my life. I embody those roles but those roles are not me. How many of us identify so closely with our roles that when those roles are not able to be lived out we are lost.

Consider parents who are ‘empty nesters’. You have played the role of parent for decades. What happens when your daughters and sons don’t need you in that role anymore?  They’ve moved on with their lives and you are left wondering what happened. Similarly, how many priests are offering private Masses alone because they identify so much with the role that they cannot act or live outside of that role?  There person has been subsumed by the role. A priest completes and is complimented by the people. Without the People of God the fullness of Christ’s presence, Head and Body is incomplete. And so a person can find themselves drifting. Reaching…reaching for what?

So many of our people have drifted away from the Church. Now I understand how people can “drift” away. I understand and yet don’t understand. Sunday mornings are especially quiet. My prayer life is primarily liturgical and communal; movement, ritual, touch, music, the non-verbal symbols of water, incense and oil. Oddly, I don’t seem to miss them right now. Unmoored, drifting. It’s deeper than people being pained by the sexual scandal, the changes in the liturgy, the treatment of women in our Church, the lack of strong episcopal leadership. It is something within.  I am continually asking, “Where is God leading me? Where is all this going?” The feeling is queer. It is not a crisis of faith. I very much regularly talk with God but…  There it is again. But… Is it the experience of exile that I have spoken with you about on Holy Thursday and in the Easter Season?

Is it the uncertainty of it all, an unmooring from shore; a floating aimlessly on the waters. No one has definitive answers, neither the government, the medical profession, the diocese, nor science. We humans so want definite answers, don’t we? We want to know the score, where we are going, when we will arrive. An unsure, cautious, tentative answer is simply not acceptable. Yet that’s where we find ourselves.

Wrap these feelings up with a worldwide health crisis, an economic crisis, racial inequality, the divisiveness of discourse, the issue of policing, the environment, the rise of extreme nationalism and we can be made to feel more isolated and frustrated.

Is this what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote that creation is groaning in labour pains? Is that what I am feeling? What I think many of you may be feeling; a groaning within ourselves? What is society, what is the world, what is the Church giving birth to? All we seem to know is that it is very painful.

Paul speaks about creation awaiting with eager expectation. I don’t feel eager expectation. Paul writes that creation would be set free from slavery to corruption. How resonant those words slavery and corruption ring in our ears at this time in our society. Is it the longing to be set free that I/we are feeling?

This longing; this ache is deep in our souls. It is more than that everything simply go back to normal. It must be more. I believe that it is a spiritual wound that is seeking healing within each of us, within our Church. It is the pain and labour of child birth. We need to recognize it is the deep longing of the soul…the soul is yearning, searching, reaching for Jesus and we may not recognize where or through whom he is present. Yet only in Jesus will we find not a safe harbour but the One who sits with us as the storm surges and tosses us around in the boat.

I expect I raise more questions than answer. I speak about my feelings in hope that they resonant with yours. And if so, maybe it comes down to knowing that though unmoored and drifting on the ocean of unknowing and being taken away by the currents of serious world transforming issues we are in the same boat and not alone.