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Former Oblate Priest Accepted in Anglican Community
Jim Holland, Shawnigan Lake
Volume 33 Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: September 29, 2019
There was priest named John who served in this diocese some years ago. Like Grant Croswell he came to the priesthood in his later years. Also, like Grant he was of Irish descent and a very good story teller.
I remember him telling me the story of his ACPO experience. For those of you unfamiliar with that acronym it is the advisory committee on postulants for ordination. A formidable name for a group with a formidable task. This Committee meets for a weekend once a year or so to help discern whether those aspiring to the priesthood are fit to enter seminary and be ordained.
There was priest named John who served in this diocese some years ago. Like Grant Croswell he came to the priesthood in his later years. Also, like Grant he was of Irish descent and a very good story teller.
I remember him telling me the story of his ACPO experience. For those of you unfamiliar with that acronym it is the advisory committee on postulants for ordination. A formidable name for a group with a formidable task. This Committee meets for a weekend once a year or so to help discern whether those aspiring to the priesthood are fit to enter seminary and be ordained.
John told me about arriving at his ACPO weekend, and very quickly being brought into a large room in which the team of discerners were sitting in a circle. In the middle of the circle was an empty chair. John sat in the chair and waited. After a period of silence someone asked the first question. “So, why do you want to be a priest?” John said the question genuinely surprised him. And his answer surprised the discernment team. It may surprise you.
This was his response: “I never said I wanted to be a priest. I have had a long and satisfying career in the government, and I have been looking forward to a long and carefree retirement. Being a clergyman is not my idea of a stress-free way to spend my golden years. I am here because I haven’t been able to escape a persistent, relentless push to pursue ordination. This isn’t my idea, I’m here because I know that it is where God wants me to be.”
The scripture readings we just heard go to great lengths to tell us that we are chosen, but what does this mean? What does it mean to be chosen?
I suspect that most of us in this culture think of being chosen as the end of a process that we have engineered ourselves. Being chosen means getting what we want. I am chosen for a job or a position from a field of competitors because I have made myself the most attractive candidate. Being chosen means getting our way, because we are special. It means getting what we deserve. Does this resonate with your thinking?
But if we can refrain from reading our own meaning into the scriptures, I suggest that we find a very different meaning, not that we have chosen God, not that we deserve God’s love, not that we have won some celestial competition, but that God chooses us, and that it is in God’s nature to choose us, and to invite us into divine love, to a life of service to the divine agenda, to go where God wants us to go.
For those who come before a Bishop to be ordained, knowing a tenacious, obdurate and inescapable call seems to be a universal experience.
The priesthood is not a career one chooses because it is rational. It isn’t for the prestige, and it certainly isn’t for the money. It is not a career that one chooses from a list of possible livelihoods. Yes, it can be satisfying, full of joy, and at times a grand adventure, but I can’t imagine anyone flourishing in, or even surviving the priesthood, who enters it simply because they thought it was a good idea.
We live in a culture in which personal choice has become paramount, or rather where the illusion of choice has. How often are we asked to like something on Facebook, as if our preferences and choices are supremely important? How often are we aghast when the world, or the government or the church fail to coincide with our choices, and fail to meet our expectations of what they should be?
The illusion of personal choice is the foundation of the consumer society of which we are all a part. We are bombarded with messages designed to convince us that our world is nothing but a series of wonderful choices, if only we are willing to work hard enough to accumulate the money needed to claim them. We are convinced that we are the choosers, even when we are being chosen.
Today’s scriptures fly in the face of this ideology. You did not choose God, Jesus tells us, God has chosen you.
Grant has felt the fierce and implacable pursuit of God all his life. He first understood this call when he encountered the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters who taught him in school. Their communal life moved him and attracted him, and set him on the path to exploring the possibility of living in a religious community himself. That path led him to the Oblate Fathers, where he was at times told to go places he was happy to go, and at other times to places he never would have chosen.
When he met a young woman with flaming red hair and a heart to match, he was led from the priesthood into the intimacy of marriage, where he encountered God in a different way.
Through it all Grant remained open to the nudging, the prodding the movement of God in his life, to doors that closed here and opened there. And it has all led him here to this afternoon in this church with all of us.
God has chosen Grant and God (Oh, and the Bishop) will choose how Grant will serve. The agenda is not Grant’s. It is God’s agenda, an agenda is written in people who will appear in his life needing the very specific grace that is his measure.
Growth in Christian maturity comes to all of us as it comes to Grant, as we relinquish our preferences, our choices and allow ourselves to be recruited as servants of the divine agenda, as we respond to the urgings of the Spirit, as we say yes to God.
The 19th century English poet Francis Thompson, felt the pursuit of God. He felt it as his life went off the rails, as he became addicted to opium and lived as a street person in the roughest parts of London. Interestingly, God’s grace finally found him in the form of a prostitute who befriended him and eventually lead him out of addiction and poverty.
He chronicles his experience in his poem, The Hound of Heaven. Many of you will be familiar with these now famous verses:
I fled him down the nights and down the days. I fled him down the arches of the years. I fled him down the Labyrinthine ways of my own mind.
The flight from God that Thompson describes can be a frightening way to live.
But here is the good news: that God pursues us not to manipulate, or dominate or fool us, not to rule us, or to cause us to be unthinking slaves.
God pursues us that we might know the fullness of divine love, in order that we might become our best selves, that we might know the power and grace to change lives.
God has pursued Grant for reasons that we or he may never fully understand; reasons that will only become evident in the mundane, day to day work of loving both the lovable and the unlovable, of serving those who will be grateful for his help, and those who will respond with ingratitude, those who will hear his teaching and preaching with open hearts and minds, and those who will respond with resistance or indifference.
We are all chosen by God to be manifestations of God’s grace in our own way, whether we like it or not. It is up to us only to assent, to say yes, and to commit ourselves to God’s agenda.
The Sufi poet Hafiz wrote some 600 years ago that responding to the divine call, and to know God’s purpose for us is simple, simple enough even for a child to understand; The Dance.
And today we are all invited to join the dance with Grant, to dance to a divine, joy-filled music. We only need to listen.
Grant, may you always find the divine dance to be a source of joy and freedom. May it lead you to new and unexpected adventures. And may you always know in your heart that you are chosen, and that your most important job as priest is to help others know that they too are chosen to live in God’s love.
Jim Holland, Shawnigan Lake