What a difference a day makes....

24 hours from now, I will no longer be the Rector of St. John's--something that has defined me in many ways for 21 years almost.

Well, they are paying me until the end of July, so I guess in some fuzzy way I am still the Rector...but I gave back my credit card, stopped signing checks and will hand in my key--which says 'rector' on it tomorrow. And then it will be finished...done....

Hard for me to believe but it is finally going to be true. I will be 'retired'.

I'm still not ready to say much about the whole thing except this...

*my going away 'last dance' on Sunday was everything I dreamed and prayed it would be and more and so many people made that happen just the way I wanted it and in ways I didn't know I wanted it but did that I have no way to express my profound and endless joy and thanks

*I threw away my calling cards today and peeled my name off my mail slot and got everything ready to bring home. I am stunned at how calmly I did all that (plus take my letterhead...I used the last Rector's letter head for a year or so.....)

*People have drifted by all week, saying goodbye, being wondrous....

*I can't find my Prayerbook that lots of people signed when I came back from a sabbatical or something years ago. If they find it, I'd like to have it....

*The Iman of the mosque that began at St. John's came by with a beautiful copy of the Koran and the Koran on discs--the whole thing....lots to listen to....

*the soup kitchen clients gave me a poster sized card that lots signed, a cake Pauline dropped and 4 bottles of wine...I could have made four life-long friends handing out those bottles but decided to keep them....

*My last Eucharist was today--the Wednesday healing service....lots of people, including 3 priest friends who I was in a group with for years. I asked everyone to annoint me...my forehead still is sweet and damp with oil. A perfect ending.

*I am not afraid. In fact I am getting close to being outrageously joyful because the pain of leaving is almost over. One more day. And it will all end, as is should, with a dinner with the staff who have supported/loved/made me look good for so many years. I'll be weepy and clingy, but that is as it should be. I love those guys more than they know--more than they could know....

And then, there is what comes next.....And that I welcome and celebrate and look forward to with great joy.

I told someone today, "I've given St. John's 'some of the best years of my life' and St. John's has given me 'some of the best years of my life'." And that is simply true. Not a bad exchange rate, I'd say.

Like that. Simply like that....

Holy Ground

That's what I'm walking on these last few days as Rector of St. John's--Holy Ground.

People come by to say good-bye and I just wander around the building, not aimlessly--with great intention--drinking in the holy space, wondering at the light, astonished still by the silence and the beauty and the deep down meaning of it all.

I am so blessed.

Would that all God's people would be so blessed as I am.

Would that that were true....

Perfect, just perfect...

Yesterday was my last dance at St. John's. I won't work after Friday and in 3 months I'll be really retired--the first check from the Church Pension Fund and from SS will arrive on August 1 in our checking account. Amazing.

I'm not ready yet to write about it--it is still too foamy and bubbly and wondrous. But it was, truly, one of the best days of my life. I wouldn't change a thing.

Deep breath....Liturgy is very, very important to me and I think what we did in the liturgy was perfect, just perfect....like everything else.

I have been so profoundly blessed to have spent 21 of the best years of my life deep in the Old Man's Puzzle with the folks at St. John's.

How lucky can one person be???

Someday soon I'll be able to write about it...but not now....

I'm in love with Lucy Malpafatantial

Not even sure if that's how to spell her name. Have no idea what her ethnicity is. Never met her, never will. I spelled it phonetically from her time on CT public radio. Love her voice. Mostly love her name, however it is spelled, it sounds like this to me when she says it: Mal-paf-tantial.

Lovely.

My wife's grandfather came from Bari, Italy with the last name Lachettegnola (again phonetics) but it got changed to PEAS and then Pisano.

I love names like that. I love Lucy's voice and the way she says her name. Kind of crazy, I know. And I look forward to hearing her each day....

The back of my throat

There is a taste in the back of my throat. It's been there a day or two--not just post nasal drip--something wondrous and so sweet.

You know how they say we taste different tastes in different parts of our mouths? Know about that? Somewhere for salt, somewhere else for sweet, another place for sour....Lips and the tip of your tongue for.....let that go.....

Anyway, back there in my throat there has been a taste for a day or two.

I finally figured it out. It is the taste of happiness....

It took me so long because I'm not used to that taste. I am a consummately "joyful" person. But I don't think of myself as 'happy'--too ironic and reflective for that. Oh, I know how happiness tastes--holding a grandchild, watching the night sky, listening to music I love, eating ice cream...sure, I know that. But I'm not attached to it.

"Happiness", it seems to me, is a Bobbe Prize--a 'feeling', not something chosen, like "joy", a passing fancy, here today, gone in a heart-beat, like that.

Being at St. John's all these years has been remarkably, profoundly, always 'joyful' for me. But I see so much pain and loss and longing that I'm seldom 'happy' about it all. But, 'leaving St. John's' is so excruciating and exhausting that I realize now that the 'leaving' is almost over and in the back of my throat I taste happiness. Not to 'be gone', but that the horror of 'leaving' is almost done. It's like when I stood by my each of my parents' graves. Life was finally still and done for them, I could take a deep breath and move on. Like that.

Today I talked to a 24 year old woman from New Hampshire who wanted me to give her $700 to fix her car so she could go home to appear in court in Manchester tomorrow. I had no such amount of money, but I offered her a bus ticket home. That I could do. She left to consider it and never came back. Why she was here, why she was stranded, why she didn't take the bus, why she needed to appear in court...none of that do I know and did not ask. I know what not to ask, have learned that well....But she was lovely in many ways, very articulate (which English majors like me appreciate) and I can't for the life of me imagine what such a lovely, articulate young, young woman needs to be in court for.....

Then I talked to a man twice my size--quite a man that is!--about his father's funeral. His father is not yet dead but will be and we were discussing the whole thing. And this huge, massive man sat and sobbed for half-an-hour for his father who is not yet dead. Deep breaths is what I need. I need to focus and taste the taste in the back of my throat.

We are all--you, me, everyone--like the wings of the little parakeets I can hear yelling downstairs as I type. So fragile, so delicate, so intricately created, almost painfully perfect...that's what we are, you and I and everyone. Stranded far from home, innocent but due in court. Huge, strong, invincible but so pained.

That's what hooked me on this whole thing--this life, this work, this ministry--just the fragility of life itself and how seldom, in the back of our throats, happiness comes.....

A perfect early evening....

This is about yesterday though it might have been about today since the two days were rather seamlessly put together by nature. But it's about yesterday because I got home earlier yesterday and got to notice it all more.

Walking the dog, still bright, not yet seven p.m., I noticed the light. Cornwall is an East/West street--sunrise from Rt. 10, Sunset down the hill toward Prospect. Great light much of the time. Yesterday, stunning.

I sat on our back deck for a long time. It is canopied by hemlock and firs and red oak. You have to look almost straight up to see the sky. And the sky yesterday was the blue of that girl's eyes back in eighth grade. You never kissed her but wished you had for decades. And if you had you would have been lost forever. That blue.

We have a side yard of ferns that are coming up nicely--all ferns and rocks and old tree limbs. The wind moved the ferns feathers slightly. Our deck is assailed on two sides by Rhododendron--state flower of West Virginia, by the way--and the green of the leaves is almost blinding, shiny and deep.

There were birds in the trees and a distant woodpecker who comes every spring and I've never been able to find and see.

Even the aged Horse Chestnut tree I keep thinking is dead is in full leaf. The air felt, tasted, smelled so alive, so sweet--like something called 'forever'.

How many perfect early evenings can we expect in a year or a lifetime? Better grab one when it comes and wrench all the beauty out....

The flowers in our yards and neighbors' yards are all primary colors--reds, oranges, yellows, blue, fluffy cloud white. Not a pastel in sight last evening.

One of the hemlocks has a perfect 'Green Man' on it--I may paint him when I retire so I can see him better and show him to people. He has a long nose and deep eye sockets and a chin that trails away from his mouth.

I had a glass of white wine and smoked a forbidden cigarette and thought things no deeper than something like this: "the light...the light...the light..." for an hour our so.

Our dog slumbered on the deck, his nose under the gate to the front yard. He wasn't even thinking something as weighty as "the light...", he was 'one' with the evening.

It was 53 degrees, I noticed. My favorite temperature yesterday.

Alas--we should all have evenings like that one often....

A perfect early evening....