Ten-Finger Exercises

Back to the real world

I feel like I've been gone both longer and farther awaythan I was, and am re-entering slowly. I'm not quite ready to talk about it yet, but wanted to blog so you wouldn't think I'd jumped off a bridge somewhere. So here's the only one I wrote there.

2/6/07

I’m at a clergy retreat, the first one I’ve been able to get to in years. It’s always held in this diocese the week before Lent, and the nun who was head of the hospital chaplaincy department always had an administrative retreat the same week. Then last year, my first opportunity because I was no longer working in the hospital, we had plans to go to Whistler to visit my stepson and his wife on their vacation.

I’ve always had some mixed feelings about the clergy retreat. Some years it was better than others, of course. It always presented me with a chance, almost an obligation, to volunteer to do some part of a service: morning or evening prayer, compline, or to be deacon for the daily eucharist. I’m not very outgoing in that respect, even though I’ve been a deacon for nearly twenty years, and the nit-picking, never satisfied priest I now work under regularly has me less up for that than ever. But a friend, a Canon at the cathedral who is in charge of the retreats, came through at lunch announcing she was “trolling for deacons.” So that’s done; I’ve deaconed for two bishops today, and I can rest easy.

The first, a Canadian bishop from the defunct diocese of Caribou and now a professor at Vancouver, tells of when he was first ordained and was deaconing for a bishop. He was holding the bishop’s miter, a tall, pointed hat that has two ribbons hanging down in the back, one on either side. When he handed it to the bishop to put on, he neglected to turn it around, and the bishop, paying no attention, put it smartly on his head, wherein the ribbons flopped in his face. He exclaimed, “Stupid ass!” and Jim wished he could slide through the floor.

Another time up here I was serving with a rather pompous priest who made a show of lighting the candles before the service, and accidentally caught a dishtowel in the sacristy on fire.

So I don’t know why I would be uptight just to read the gospel, set the altar and serve communion; but I’m glad it’s over.

Too bad they don’t have Y-Fi at this convent so I can blog. Oh well, I’m storing up. Wish I could post-date them!