This blog post has three purposes.
First of all, with due apologies to Mark Twain, I wish to affirm that the reports of my death are somewhat exaggerated! I remain alive, reasonably well, and a priest of the Diocese of Portland who officially “retired” as of July 1.
Secondly, I wish to offer some sort of explanation for why I have not posted on my blog since late June. My move was completed by the end of June. Once I had begun to settle in at my new place, it was as though the ground fell out from under me. I began to feel how worn out I really was. I began to feel many of the pains I had suffered before but had to put on hold because I had to put all my available energies into mere survival. I no longer had the energy to devote to this blog. This past summer and early autumn have been a time for me to face past traumas and to receive new gifts from the Lord. This has been a time of retreat, a time of sabbatical. The Lord has been my retreat master and therapist, either directly or through some of the saints whom He has given me as patrons.
Thirdly, I wish to offer some thoughts on where my life may be headed from here. I do not see myself as “retired” so much as finally being fully free to follow more fully the vocation for which the Lord has been preparing me all of my life. My time now, I believe, is meant to be a transition and a more proximate preparation for this fuller vocation. What this fuller vocation will be is being shown me gradually. Because of this, I cannot be very definite about it even now. I’m still in a time of vigil, waiting like the ten wise virgins with their lamps readied. Still, there are some things I can say about it.
My vocation may not be the typical one for a diocesan priest, but it will be (and is) priestly in its very essence. It will not involve parish ministry, but will be contemplative and eremitic. My vocation will be rooted in friendship rather than function: first of all, friendship with the Lord, who calls His followers friends; secondly, friendship with patron saints who have been given to me, and with Saint Thorlak in particular; thirdly, friendship with a few people who will be collaborators with me. My vocation will involve the kind of gifts that someone with autism often receives – not only for that person’s own good but for the good of the Church and the world. This will be expressed especially by empathy with others who are regarded as disabled or of less value or as unworthy of being sought after as friends. It is only when one has befriended people who are considered least in this world that one can dare to claim to be a friend of Christ.
What, then, will become of this blog? I do not yet know. As my sense of my vocation becomes clearer, so, too, will the place of this blog in my vocation. I need a clearer sense of this blog’s purpose before I can begin posting regularly in it. It is possible that I will return to doing what I had been doing, with perhaps more of an emphasis on the themes I have just outlined in this post. Or, it is possible that I will be led to take this blog into a new direction.
I ask that you keep me in prayer during this time, that I may be truly open to following the Lord wherever He may lead me. It is only in such a way that I can fulfill the purpose that the Lord had (and has) in creating me as I am in the first place.
May this year, a year with so many challenges and trials for so many people, be transformed by grace into a year when we all can know what it truly means to be loved by the Lord!