On a highway, every exit offers a different destination. You choose one or another, and, as Robert Frost wrote, that makes "all the difference." That's
discernment, from Latin "to separate," the word we Episcopalians use for weighty choices.
A fellow parishioner asked me about discernment in my life for her research into the ways that the church encourages participation. But as I considered her questions, I realized that I've never discerned anything, never taken one road over another. It's been a wide-open super-highway, and I just switch back and forth among the lanes.
She asks:
What has the process of discernment of spiritual gifts looked like in your life as a whole? How did that process lead you to the Episcopal Church?
Aside from friends, family, and dogs, the one great gift of my lifetime has been a delight in artistic expression. Music, rhymes, stories, pictures, and acting have been central to my life since early childhood, and those brought me to God. I heard Stephen Sondheim's score for the Broadway musical A Little Night Music and knew that physics and evolution explained neither his intricate music and lyrics nor my awestruck appreciation for them. [See my Stephen Sondheim page.] Soon after, I discovered a similar intersection of story, words, and music in the liturgy at the Cathedral of St. Philip.
So, an offer after college to teach Humanities and Drama at an Episcopal middle school felt natural, even inevitable, no discernment required. I would convey the love of reading, writing, and acting to students while I'd gather "life experience" to use in plays and novels of my own. I expected to teach for three years.
That was forty years ago. After one week in the classroom, the promise and vulnerability of middle school students consumed all of my energy. From then on, whatever I wrote was for my students. [Three years into teaching, I did some writing about whether or not to continue at an NEH seminar in Shreveport LA. See my recent reflection (08/2021) on that process. Thirty years later, I reflected on how my faith had developed in ways congruent with what I'd learned in the classroom. See "Gospel for Educators" (12/2016). ]
How did you experience God's call?
Choir was my entrée to involvement with the church. With rehearsals, Sundays, Evensong, and other great services, the liturgical year became for me one giant musical drama. [See "Liturgy as Theatre" (03/2013)]
Choir friends invited me to take the course Education for Ministry (EfM). Through theological reflection and my own exploration of fiction by Catholic and Episcopalian writers, the church was adding a new layer to my love of literature: a sacramental view of life that cast a spiritual light on daily routine. [See, for instance, "Saints in Spite of Themselves: Character in Graham Greene's Novels" (12/2014) and "Flannery Would Have Loved It" ((06/2016))]
Faith, I learned, was more about abundance and community than about private taboos. This insight turned out to be the "life experience" that I'd needed when I first wanted to be a writer. [See my page Those Crazy Episcopalians for a curated list of my many, many essays on faith reflected in church, arts, and experience.]
Everything else I've done in the church since then has been about communicating that vision of abundance and community. Invited to join the Vestry, I was involved in brainstorming ways to get parishioners more involved in all aspects of church. One of my initiatives was to solicit dozens of parishioners to contribute reflections on their church experience to devotion books for Advent and Lent. For a big bi-annual fund-raiser that had long involved parishioners in putting on generic "Mystery Dinner Theatre" scripts from an agency, I led the actors in creating scripts from scratch that transmuted our shared church experiences into comedy. [See "How to Knit a Mystery-Comedy",(05/2018)]
Have you been involved in a ministry that felt like it was stretching you in unexpected ways?
I was so relieved when my term as Senior Warden expired, so exhausted from worrying about budgets, that my impulse was to refuse my successor's invitation to chair a Rector Search Committee. But I accepted. (I remember exactly where I was when I did that: it was one of those big moments.)
At first, I was okay using my acumen to shape a parish profile, a survey, and letters to candidates. But it was a stretch for an introvert like me to get deeply involved in the lives and aspirations of priests and their families. Here, discernment is the right word: we had to reach consensus on just three. (Then it would be the Vestry's turn to choose just one.)
What haunts me is the terrible Sunday afternoon when I had to call two of our five finalists to tell them they'd been eliminated. Both of them called back to ask why. I was cautious but honest in my replies. Thank God for the late Reverend Jim Yeary, our consultant. When I called him in distress, he reassured me that I had handled those moments in the best way possible.
A very positive angle on this same Search effort was the selection of a candidate whom we had eliminated from our consideration several times. For one reason or another, we kept putting his name back in the running, and the Vestry told me they voted, not for someone safe, but someone special.
That was my one experience of true discernment, and, as Flannery O'Connor wrote for one of her characters, "I'm glad I've went once, but I ain't goin' back again."
Is there any ministry you are involved in that feels like it is closest to your natural gifts, and where would you like to see your gifts lead you in the future?
It's all wrapped up in my blog. With my friend Susan, I'm co-mentor of EfM, where we often can collect the disparate threads of an evening's discussion in a special prayer aptly called a "collect." [See Where Prayer Meets Poetry (05/2020)]. My postings on my lifelong enthusiasms garner some readers for my personal blog each day, even years after I've posted them.
When retirement comes soon, I don't foresee much of a change. Same highway, same lanes, less traffic.
Next stop: 218 miles to San Francisco! (I've got a 30 mile head start.)
