Good morning, everyone. It’s been awhile but I’m coming back around slowly making journaling part of my morning routine once again. I’m coming back around to a lot of things, good things, actually.
I’m thinking here of what happened this past weekend when the pastor of the church where I’m now a member became sick suddenly and asked me to take over her ministerial duties. She and her husband, until my recent move, were neighbors and by now have become good friends. She also knew of my pastoral background. I was trained at Yale Divinity School and had served two churches before going into college work. It was natural that she would ask my help. And I, as naturally, said yes wanting to help any way I could but at the same time experiencing some anxiety. Could I, at 91 years, really do this with ease and grace? As is typical of me these days, I’m never that certain about anything and my pastoral past was too long ago to really count.
The first job the next day was to conduct a renewal of wedding vows for a couple who had been married 50 years. It was held at the yacht club the next town over. Fortunately, she had the service typed out. All I had to do was read it. If I were an actor, I would be assuming my pastor’s personae, acting, presenting the material as she would have. But my job was only to convey her words, not to act but to perform, thank goodness, bringing my own warmth, my own style, to the couple and the 100 people in attendance. I noted the challenge. Her words were not my words. Her breathing pattern and word choice not mine, but inching me, nevertheless, toward acting in clumsy imitation, particularly as I try to tell her joke as she has written it.
Such a relief the next day to know I was a mere performer, conducting the Sunday service. But how hard to pull it off! Reading the pastor’s words in prayers and sermon, both so personal, like the day before, kept drawing me in, wanting me to convey the depth of her feeling, pulling me to enactment. In the end, though, I knew that what I initially thought was true. Like Shakespeare, I have no trouble seeing the world as a stage. But most of us will not be actors on it. We’ll be more like performers, hardly able to play ourselves, a conclusion I’m driven to but unhappy with.
I’m clearly not through with this subject because I see as our challenge today to become exactly that: to become actors, to play ourselves, to become the complete, whole, beautiful, human beings we are, alive with promise. As I said above, I’m uncertain about most everything but on one issue I have no doubt. We have within us the power to change. Our job is to tap into it, to discover it for ourselves, to leave behind the digital distractions, at least for some of the time, to focus anew on what’s within awaiting your discovery and a new life. I know this because it has happened, is happening, to me and I want that for you, too.
