Auditioning to be Trees

THE LAST PAGE OF A JOURNAL: September 2, 2011

On June 4, 2007, I began a three month sabbatical and a new personal journal. September 1, 2011, was my first day as a retired priest, and, 500 pages later, I wrote the last entry on the last page of that same journal. The first few entries from 2007 contain musings upon the death in a car crash of Jim Kelsey, a friend and inspired Bishop of Northern Michigan, as well as upon a book I had begun reading by Henri Nouwen. The book was a journal about Nouwen’s own “last sabbatical,” journal entries he had written that turned out to be his last because he died unexpectedly not long after the sabbatical ended.

Now my sabbatical journal is full, and my rectorship has ended. At St. Stephen’s we spent August baptizing and anointing, crying and laughing, as we moved from one intensive closure activity to the next. All this transpired with a “soundtrack” consisting of loud exultant hymns and sentimental old standards. Now all the observances are over, the last descanted hymn verse has faded into silence, and I find myself inhabiting a strange new landscape, with Jim Kelsey and Henri Nouwen looking over my shoulder as I write.

Strange, but not entirely unfamiliar. Along with Jim and Henri, I sense myself in company with those original disciples in the hours following Jesus’ death. Like me, they must have felt stunned, empty, and uncertain about the future. Like them, I expect, there is a sense of finality, of having seen the beginning and the ending, the alpha and the omega, and that no such public intensity will ever again descend upon me again. But, of course, those disciples were in for a big surprise.

A keen stab of emotional pain brings it all into the present. Caitlin auditioned for My Fair Lady on Tuesday, and was kept until the end, but has received no call. This is a familiar desolation. For me, Caitlin is Ti Moun, the passionate and generous girl she played in Once Upon an Island, waiting outside the elegant hotel with infinite hopefulness and love, utterly convinced that her high class boyfriend will notice her and remember their love.

That image tears me up. It did so when I saw Caitlin play the part, and it does so now, as I think of her in New York, waiting for the casting agent to call.

Except Caitlin is no chump. She loves the stage, and is powerfully motivated to endure the disciplines of her vocation. She will not cast herself upon the steps of the theater and wait there until, like Ti Moun, she turns into a tree. She is already a tree, and, as The Book of Revelation says, “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Well, for the healing of her father, anyway, and of her family, and husband, and anyone else whose life she touches.

And I will be a tree also. Yesterday’s Old Testament reading was from The Book of Job, where Job laments his sorry condition, saying “My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me.” If that seems a bit extreme for either Caitlin’s circumstances or for mine, well, OK… but not for Jim Kelsey’s, or Henri Nouwen’s. Not for those early Christian disciples. We are sitting in the same church with them even now, and will share their pew soon enough. In the interim we will let them teach us how to feel the truth of our condition, and so rise up as trees.

We are auditioning to be trees.