Back to Basics

A few days ago a friend of mine posted on his Facebook feed that it was the 10th anniversary of his ordination:

I've marked the anniversary by doing the things I was ordained to do. Among them praying the office in church; presiding and preaching at Mass; praying with people; talking with and providing some food and washing powder for a heroine addict; a funeral/bereavement visit; and getting out and about in the community.

Ah, I realised, If young Christopher was celebrating the 10th anniversary of his ordination (and good for him), so must I have been; although I can’t remember the date itself without looking it up (he was ordained in a different diocese to me and so possibly on a different date), I must have been on holiday, so I may well have marked the day by getting up late, going shopping, and mucking about in the garden. Not quite so priestly. Or not so specifically.

Normally, then, the actual anniversary of my ordination passes me by. I do get recalled to my sense of what I’m supposed to be doing at two other points, though: the Chrism Mass at the Cathedral on Maundy Thursday, when all the diocesan clergy renew their vows along with the bishop, and the closest Sunday to the date in September when I was installed at Swanvale Halt, when it is my custom to rehearse my vows before the churchwardens as representatives of the laypeople. I don’t know whether anyone else does this, but I find it as instructive and useful for me to be reminded what I’m there for as for the congregation.

In amidst all the convincing and absorbing stuff about church management, mission planning, co-ordinating change and so on, it’s easy to lose track of what priestly ministry actually means. A competent layperson could do any of those things, and probably be better than me at them. They might well carry out the pastoral work young Christopher describes better than me, and – did only Canon Law permit them – could perhaps even perform the strictly liturgical stuff which is proper to my ordained office with greater concentration, spiritual seriousness or aplomb than I do. But they would not be a sacramental sign of God’s presence, as I am.

I – for better or worse – am surrounded by promises, mine and God’s, which is what the word sacrament means. There's a difference between doing things, and promising to do them. When I knelt before the Bishop ten years ago and he laid his hands on me I was promising to be a public, identifiable, inescapable sign of God’s presence, and God was promising that I would be too. I was promising that I would do the things our holy Mother the Church does to make God’s presence visible, those other ‘sacraments’ which form the ‘religious stuff’ I do – as I say, for better or worse, adequately or inadequately. That was the reason why it was done; looking at who I am and how far I have to go even to be a good Christian, there can’t be another one.