Make yourself at home
I tripped on the stairs leading to the platform
This is mostly about rectors and vicars as well as new parishioners as they navigate their first couple of years in a new parish. And it applies to being in a parish for ten years and finding that the parish you had become part of was now different. Very different.
I tripped on the stairs
Here’s Melissa Kirsch in today’s New York Times, “Good morning. We know that happiness is to be found in taking our time and being present. How can we slow down and stop rushing our way through life? … Racing to catch a subway train recently, I tripped on the stairs leading to the platform, steadying myself only barely by grabbing the arm of an unsuspecting and rightfully alarmed fellow passenger. I sustained no major damage — a scraped knee, a bruise on my thigh I’d discover a week later. These injuries were, I told myself in the aftermath, well deserved. I’d disregarded one of my precepts for personal happiness, the one that stipulates, “Most misery is caused by rushing.” … We rush because we’re late. We also rush because we want to move quickly away from discomfort. We rush to come up with solutions to problems that would benefit from more sustained consideration. We rush into obligations or decisions or relationships because we want things settled. Worrying is a kind of rushing: It’s uncomfortable to sit in a state of uncertainty, so we fast-forward the tape, accelerating our lives past the present moment into fearsome imagined scenarios.”
It's not new advice. Some build an entire system of spirituality around “being present.” Learning to be in the “here and now” has been a significant part of the training I received and offered over the years. The Benedictine approach is to seek the presence of Jesus Christ in the people, things and circumstances of life.[i] Knowing the presence of Christ in my life enables me to be present in my life. To persist, have courage, and show some humility.
Make ourselves at home under all circumstances
Father Benson, SSJE, would have us “make ourselves at home under all circumstances.” His nineteenth century community of mission priests found themselves serving in South Africa, India and city parishes in Boston and Philadelphia. In worlds very different from that of English universities and comfortable homes. So, as Founder and Superior he bid them to make themselves at home in all circumstances.
The hardest part
The Episcopal Church and its parishes have been going through a period in which the emphasis has been on a distorted form of hospitality. We are to help others become comfortable when they join the parish. And, of course, that’s true. At least it’s part of the truth. The other part is that the new parishioner and the new vicar must make themselves at home. And that task is the hardest part of becoming part of the parish community.
The parish can offer the new member an orientation and not abandon them at the first few coffee hours. The parish can make an agreement with the new priest for adequate time off, a decent salary, and provide a few invitations to dinner. We can be patient and kind. And that is all too often not done. But whether done or left undone, the hard work is that the new member, the new Vicar, needs to accommodate themselves to the existing culture of the parish. This will not be the same comfortable place as your last parish. And it will not be the parish of your dreams, though it may take you 9 – 16 months to understand that.
“The parish priest needs a speech and a process along the lines that Father Benson had. In its particulars it needs to fit a parish church rather than an order of mission priests. Still, it can share with such groups basic Christian understandings, such as: (1) Inclusion is a two-way process. We orient you and treat you with respect and love; you take responsibility for making yourself at home, (2) As we face new circumstances within the parish and in daily life, we will need to be thoughtful about adapting as needed while also maintaining our baptismal identity and purpose. This is a very different task than focusing on maintaining everyone’s comfort and safety.” (An Energy Not its Own: Three Cycles of Parish Life and the Purposes of the Parish Church, M. Heyne & R. Gallagher, Ascension Press, 2023.
A habit of at once jumping into our place and finding ourselves at home
Father Richard Benson, SSJE, wrote of those called to the religious life an understanding that applies to all those who would contribute to the parish’s fabric of holiness, all who would be present : “The religious must be a man of great delicacy of feeling, delicacy of taste, delicacy of sentiment—not delicacy in the sense of feebleness and weakness, but delicate in the sense in which an experienced surgeon handles a tender part firmly but delicately, in the way in which an experienced hand will disentangle the fibers of a plant that has been dried, the delicacy with which the smallest things are touched by one of experience. … We must be as religious cherishing a habit of at once jumping into our place and finding ourselves at home in it, just as much at home there as anywhere else … The religious life is not to be a dreamy dissatisfaction with the present state of things, it is not to be a mere not knowing what to do next, because things about us are as they are, but it is the consciousness of being able to make ourselves at home under all circumstances and able to turn everything that happens to account. This is what the religious should be—ready; ready but not fussy.” (Richard Meux Benson, Instructions on the Religious Life, third series, A. R. Mowbray & Co. Limited, London and Oxford, 1951.)
There are so many ways to trip on the stairs or to allow ourselves a “dreamy dissatisfaction with the present state of things.” It is a decision, a stance we decide to take upon ourselves – “to make ourselves at home under all circumstances and able to turn everything that happens to account.”
This abides,
Robert
The Feast of Chad, Bishop of Lichfield
[i] The Promise we take in the Order of the Ascension is “To seek the presence of Jesus Christ in the people, things and circumstances of life through stability, obedience and conversion of life.”