Summer Breezes and Winds of the Spirit

Theo, my Westie, trots ahead on the dirt road, happily sniffing the various thistles and plants along the way. I do not know their names yet. It is my first full day in my “hermitage” as I am calling it, and I am exploring the 70 acres on which the house sits that my priest friend and his wife are letting live in.

It has been almost three months since I was let go from my position as assistant rector at St. John’s because the budget needed to be balanced. The severance they offered me would run out the end of this month. The parish had been generous and had taken up a collection for a “purse” as well, and I have figured that it would last me another couple of months since I did not have to pay rent. I have this deep abiding sense that I will be okay, that something will materialize from the applications I had sent out on line, applications I had filled out for various parishes, Hospice chaplain positions, a couple of addictions treatment chaplain positions.

Like the sparsely planted plains and hills spread out before me as I walk down the road, the responses to my appeals had been few. Of 20 packets of information I sent out to parishes listed in the Church Deployment Office Positions Open Bulletin, I had never heard anything from several; I had been told by more than half of the parishes that they would be in touch once they collected all of the applications; and of those, five had eventually sent polite form letters saying that I was no longer being considered for the position. I was still waiting, though not very optimistically, to hear from a few more. I would send out another batch of applications this week

Perhaps it was the summer, when most church employees take vacation, that had slowed down the process for so many people. Almost as a reminder of that fact, I feel perspiration trickling behind my ears, as my head begins to sweat characteristically. Or perhaps it was General Convention, our national convention held every three years, and which was attended by every bishop and deployment officer for every diocese. Diocesan business would have ground to a halt around the country during the legislative gathering. It was over now. Maybe I would hear something from one of the remaining parishes.

I did not expect them to realize the urgency of my need for a job. This was not really “their” problem. But being the church… I caught myself in the midst of what was beginning to seem like a very naïve way of looking at life in the church. If anything, it seemed, being the church meant that we operated less efficiently AND less empathetically than organizations in the secular world. I would no longer continue to insist that maybe this time the church might be pastoral in its response to my being unemployed.

Passing the manure pile where my friends had dumped their wheelbarrows when cleaning out the barn, I catch a whiff of the sweet/acrid waste. Jesus had a preference for those cast out and in the margins, those considered unclean and rejected by the world.

Watch it, I tell myself as I enter into the territory of self-pity. I cannot not afford to go there, for my spirit, nor for my motivation to discern where God was calling me next. But I feel embraced by something hidden, even as a luscious summer breeze plays itself around me. God is there. And for now, that is enough.