Leaving

I share a recent change in my life with my blog’s readers.

Shortly after I started coelietterra I entered into a one-year contract with a large church to serve as its interim pastor. I did this despite an earlier resolution made with myself to retire, finally and in fact, and not to accept another long-term, full-time position. I convinced myself I was keeping my resolve by agreeing to work only three-quarter’s time.

I soon realized that the position I had accepted was not, at least for me, a part-time one. I became overwhelmed by what I thought I should be doing. Half-way through the contracted year, anxious inner wrestling convinced me that I could not continue in the position. I asked to be able to leave the relationship with the church. Church leaders graciously accepted my request, and Sunday was my last day there. I know the church will move forward, but I also know have I let some people down - disappointed them. I will spare you the details.

I have not been able to get myself entirely comfortable with what I have done. I cannot tell if the “reasons” I have creatively developed about whether it was okay to leave have substance or are mere excuses. They start with, “I’ve never done anything like this before,” and end with “I’ll never do anything like that again.” The first is not true, and the second is unprovable. Between them are rationalizations, justifications, blaming others, and, most questionable of all, attempts to assign grand, even divinely-inspired purpose behind my decision. Frankly, I don’t know if there is even a hint of God in the whole business.

Could I have done something else? Could we have orchestrated some other outcome? Perhaps. But I felt at the time and I continue to feel that my decision to ask to leave was one I had to make - that I had no choice. (My previous post, “Turnpike’s Trees,” conveys part of what was charging through my mind as I decided.)

Looking ahead, I am committed to writing for the wider public. Writing is a common post-retirement calling for many of us preachers - as if we have not done enough of it throughout our careers. But I am planning to spend real time casting words upon a blank page and/or video screen. I started this blog to share my experience of things of “heaven and earth” with anyone who might be interested. I want to get back to it in earnest.

I have received encouragement to move on in a quote from a book that was recently reviewed by Martin Copenhaver (Christian Century, March 7; pp. 30ff). In Year of Plenty Presbyterian minister Craig L. Goodwin writes how he and his family embarked on a year of eating food and buying items “that were local, used, homegrown or homemade.” After the year started Goodwin began blogging about his family’s experiences, which eventually turned into what Copenhaver calls a “charming book.” (I am energized by Craig Goodwin’s transition from blog to print.)

Goodwin admits they sometimes “broke the rules”; that they did what they had said they would not do, or did not do something they said they would do. What did they learn about rules and following them? Goodwin writes,

“We discovered that a key to having rules to live by is not just sorting out how to enforce them, but also discerning when it’s okay to break them. Following rules is always an improvisational act, a living compromise where the constraints of human life crash up against hopes and ideals.”

Thanks, colleague whom I’ve yet to meet. You have given me permission to embrace both the pain and the promise of my leaving, to improvise with it all as best I can, and to write my way through my hopes and ideals with as little compromise as I can muster.