Sunshine

It's been a lovely sunny day today, and I've made the most of it, spending time in four gardens and working pretty hard in each one.  Next week doesn't look so good, so I need to do what I can while I can! Anyway, Ann and I went on to have a very pleasant meal out (in our local Greek restaurant) after my hard day's work. In between pulling weeds, I've been reflecting on all the stuff I wrote about yesterday.  I closed my comments yesterday with a reference to the need for prayer.  So what shall I be praying for?

I think the intention of my praying must be to clarify my relationship with the Church and my relationship with God.  They are not one and the same.  The status of priest is mine because the Church has made me a priest;  and because currently the Church denies me a licence, I am a priest who cannot be a priest, in any practical way.  But the beginning of that journey to priesthood has to do not with what the Church says to me, or asks of me, or recognises in me - but in my sense of God's call and prompting.  What the Church does with that is to interpret it as a call to ordination.  Usually the Church is right in its interpretation, and sometimes it is wrong.

Right or wrong, what then happens is that the individual person is locked into a relationship with the Church within which, if all goes well, that sense of God's call can deepen and become fruitful.  But sometimes what happens is the reverse of this, and a person becomes stifled and cramped, imprisoned by the Church as institution.  The bird that should fly free is instead locked in a cage, however gilded that cage may be.

I find I am not worried or distressed by yesterday's letter.  I shall not have sleepless nights, or I hope I won't anyway.  There've been enough of them over the past months.  I am a little unsettled, perhaps.  I don't expect, or even want, particularly, any sort of instant resolution - but I do hope that the coming weeks might bring me to a sense of being in process, of having some kind of programme ahead of me.  I've been strung along often enough, and for long enough.  So I hope to be treated fairly, prayerfully, considerately, and as me, as who I am, not just according to some formula.