'twixt already and not yet - in minor key

 THOUGHTS ON INTERREGNA (written during one, years ago) 

Over my 40 years of involvement in Mother Cantuar (have I mentioned that’s my nickname for the Anglican Church?) I have journeyed through a number of parish and diocesan interregnums (yeah, or interregna). I remember well my first experience of the process. I was a parishioner at my (first) “church of origin,” All Saints’, Palmerston North. The vicar announced his resignation, and the priest (he wouldn’t like the word) who was on the parish team as a sort of senior assistant, took over. I was particularly cranky: I happened to be going out with the out-going vicar’s daughter, but that’s another story.

I was no great fan of the interim priest. He represented the tradition that felt that to preach a sermon under 30 minutes duration was to insult God. The departed vicar was a fine preacher, with a better sense of the balance of liturgy and “word.” The interim not so much. To compensate for his interminably long sermons (often followed by interminably long intercessions) he raced through the communion like a race commentator: “this time, and they’re …” Oh, whoops, sorry, wrong script. (Someone else will have to take care of Daggy Boy). The holiness of the Eucharist (though I didn’t know the word back then) was stolen from me. To get it back I started sneaking off to Mass at a nearby Roman Catholic parish, where the priest was as fine a liturgist and preacher as I ever encountered in any church before or since. Sadly he was later felled by a stroke, and never preached or presided again.

But, back at the Anglican parish, I shared the apprehension felt by many. What lay ahead? The dynamism of the departed vicar was never likely to be met, I feared, and the momentum that he had initiated would all dwindle to nothing. We were a fairly passionate bunch, I guess, in that parish, and hearts were in mouths for a while. Eventually a new vicar came, and I did my best not to fall into the trap of comparisons. Several months later I left for Australia, where as it happens I would experience the process again in my next three parishes (Flemington, North Melbourne, East Bentleigh). Eventually I became a parish priest, doing the complex dance of coming and going. Added to that a handful of episcopal electoral processes (Melbourne, Grafton, Auckland, Waiapu) and I began to get a complex: did I frighten all my spiritual leaders away?

The outcomes were not always – perhaps not ever! – indication that God agreed with my choices. I won’t tell tales but I was to see the good, the bad and the ugly over the change processes that followed (no, I won’t say which was which). Yet through all the changes and chances I have continued to see the fingerprints of the God who generates space for us to change and grow as human beings, made in divine image. Somehow the rumour of resurrection, sung in various keys, has gone on in all those places.

That commission, to rumour resurrection hope, must be our primary concern in every time of interregnum (and every time is a time of interregnum!).