Called

by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Overview

The life and ministry of a priest are two aspects of the same journey, and beloved author and priest Barbara Cawthorne Crafton approaches this journey in four sections, envisioned as embracing a clerical life. The first, “The Dream,” contains the early years of discernment, training, and youthful ministry. The second, “Desert,” deals with the terrible obstacles (self-created or inflicted from outside), that may end a ministry or wound it deeply. The third, “The Dance,” is that period of time in which you know who you are and how you serve, and the flow of life and ministry is effectively graceful. The last, “The Death,” deals with the priest’s physical decline and death. Crafton lays out this path with all of her usual warmth and humor, offering insights and a companion in the way, not just to priests but to all of us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819232922
Publisher:	Church Publishing
Publication date:	01/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	403 KB

About the Author

BARBARA CAWTHORNE CRAFTON is a popular preacher, retreat leader, and writer who teaches at Marble Collegiate Church and at the General Theological Seminary in New York City. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Reader's Digest, Episcopal Life, and many other publications. She is the author of many books, including Called, The Courage to Grow Old, The Sewing Room, Living Lent, and many others. She lives in Metuchen, New Jersey.

Read an Excerpt

Called

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By Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2017 Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-3292-2

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CHAPTER 1

THE DREAM OF THE PRIEST

I STILL DREAM SOMETIMES THAT I can fly. Flying is really easy — you surmount the tops of houses and sail over them, looking down at the roof tiles and chimneys as they pass beneath you. Maybe you approach a grove of trees, a bit cowed by their great height. Then you remember that you can fly, and your troubles are over: you float above them all. Funny, I never dream of landing — only of the ascent. I always awaken from these dreams a little surprised to be earthbound.

Let's see: a ballerina. An archeologist. A lawyer. A college professor. A singer. An actor. I thought I might be a lot of things. Priest was not on the radar screen for girls when I was young, so when I raised it as a possibility I was told that girls couldn't be priests, and I accepted that as the fact it was. I know many women priests who yearned to be ordained long before it was possible, but I was not one of them. There were plenty of other things to be.

I crowded some of these ambitions together at the same time — a career combining ballet and archeology made perfect sense to me for at least a year. I remember a friend in my dance class who wanted to be both a dancer and a nun. Why not, we told each other? The world was so full of interesting things to be, and our energy was boundless — we could not recall ever having been tired. Time seemed endless to us. In short, nothing stood in the way of our doing anything we wanted to do. This we knew. We were eleven or twelve, I think. Not enough of our lives had passed yet to sober us. Young girls think they can do anything.

Even after that golden I'll-have-one-of-everything phase is over, another invincible season follows, one in which it seems that a person can do anything she sets her mind to. That limits aren't real; they are merely a failure of nerve. I wish everybody could feel that way forever, but nobody does. Life is just not like that.

Eventually, you settle on something, in a more informed choice. Maybe you meet someone who already does that to which you aspire. Probably you seek out such people, make it your business to meet as many of them as you can, gravitating toward everything about this profession on which you are in the process of setting your heart.

Perhaps there are special clothes and equipment — a uniform, a lab coat. A stethoscope, perhaps. For us, a clerical collar and liturgical vestments. There are special stores that sell only clerical furnishings, and a quiet but rather intense rivalry exists among these establishments in their competition for the largest share of what has always been a very small market.

A flat package arrives at the door. You know what it is — you've been expecting it, with an eagerness that would embarrass you if you thought anybody else knew about it. It is your new black clerical shirt, your first. With it, three round white collars and a set of collar studs — soon, you will have to order more studs, but you don't know that yet. You don't know how easy they are to lose.

You wait until you are alone to try it on-you don't really want anyone else to know that your appearance matters to you. You are a bit surprised yourself, actually; surely it was the work itself to which you were called, not the clothes. Occasionally, you have heaped inner scorn upon people you thought were too attracted to the haberdashery of your calling; now you appear to be one of them. And yet you study yourself in the mirror, once you've plumbed the intricacies of fastening the collar onto the shirt, an operation that was second nature to gentlemen of the Victorian era and will very soon be second nature to you. Something like a cleric looks back at you, somebody dressed in a way people don't dress any more, and never did, really: although well-dressed men of the nineteenth century did wear detachable collars, the round "dog collar" is not ancient, nor is it a survival of street wear from an earlier age, as so many liturgical vestments are. It dates only from the 1840s, and only clerics have ever worn it. Before 1840, the clergy dressed like everyone else. So did doctors, until even later, and nurses as well.

You don't know yet how often you will wear yours. You haven't learned yet that if you forget to pack your collar on a trip, you can make one out of stiff paper folded lengthwise, or from plastic you have cut in a strip from a white jug of laundry detergent. You don't know yet that you can fabricate a collar stud from a paper clip, if one of yours drops irretrievably down a grate, or that you can use a cufflink. There is some other stuff you don't know yet.

My friend Kevin grew up Irish Catholic. He loved everything about church — the Latin, the incense, the music, the statues, the bread and the wine. Of course he was an altar boy. He was scrupulous in all his observances — a daily Mass and the daily confession that went with it, the keeping of every fast day. He loved all the priests in his parish, and was always available to serve them at the altar. It was apparent to him from before he made his First Holy Communion that he was born to be a priest, too, and everything in his life for as long as he could remember had been in preparation for that. His mother was proud — her son, a priest!

At seventeen, he was sent to minor seminary with the blessing of his entire Brooklyn neighborhood. Of course he loved it. He strove to excel in holiness, really to be the devout Catholic he knew God wanted him to be. He fasted more than other students, stayed in chapel longer after the liturgies had ended. Every day was a test, a chance to be better than he had been the day before.

Such devotion. I am guessing that he might have been a bit holier-than-thou with the other seminarians. Kevin was very young then, and young people aren't always as sensitive to the feelings of others as they might be.

The seminary years continued, and his devotion only increased, if that were possible. Certainly his professors' job was to encourage their students' piety, but even they grew concerned about Kevin's extreme version of it. It was too much! They forbade his extra fasts, his long chapel vigils. He needed to eat and sleep. The tussle between their concern and his devotion was an ongoing war. In time, Kevin lost. He was asked not to return.

He would never be a priest.

Kevin's dream was destroyed. The church to which he had dedicated his life had rejected his offering of himself. To say that he was devastated would be like saying that the Grand Canyon is big.

A long period of desolation followed. He found a secular career. He turned away from the church — it didn't help that these were the years in which the innovations of Vatican II were implemented, and Kevin couldn't stand any of them. The dignity and beauty he had loved all his life was swept away in a vernacular swirl of guitar music. It was clear that there was no church for him anymore.

Cutting this cord did open him to some things he had never considered. Love was one — he met the man who would become his life partner, and they began a relationship that would last more than fifty years. He lived a New York life, like millions of his fellow citizens — Sunday morning brunch with the New York Times. Years passed.

One day, Kevin was walking along West 46th Street on his way back to his office from lunch. He heard the music of an organ and looked in the direction from which it came, the open door of a church. He had passed that church a thousand times, but today the door was open. He climbed the steps and peered in: the priest was censing the altar, flanked by the deacon and subdeacon, who each lifted the hem of his beautiful brocade cope out of his way as he moved from one end of the altar to the other. Kevin could smell the incense from the door. He turned aside from his journey and walked in. The holy water stoup beside the entrance was full — he wet his fingers and crossed himself, for the first time in years. A statue of the Blessed Mother greeted him from behind her bank of votive candles in a station halfway down the nave.

The Mass was in English, yes, but it was Elizabethan English. It was not precisely the church of his childhood, but it was close enough. There was not a guitar in sight. Kevin was home.

The priest caught sight of him after the Mass and greeted him kindly. They talked for a few minutes that day, and Kevin hurried back to his office. But he began to attend Mass daily. He joined the parish. He did whatever he could to help out. No task was too big or too small. His partner was welcomed by the priest and everyone else when he visited. Kevin's Irish Catholic mother was dead by now, so she was spared the knowledge that her son was becoming an Episcopalian. This was a good thing, for it probably would have killed her.

The priest suggested that Kevin attend a Cursillo retreat-the first one ever in Episcopal New York. He became a leader in that worldwide spiritual renewal community, founded and led by laypeople. This involved leadership at retreat weekends, where Kevin frequently was called upon to tell his story.

We heard this story often, over the years. Fifteen talks are given on a Cursillo weekend, and over the dozens of retreats in which he assisted, Kevin gave most of them, some more than once. This story of his vocation almost always made an appearance. Kevin revived his habit from seminary of staying in chapel (sometimes all night) to pray for people on the weekends, now an offering instead of scrupulosity. He was a mentor to many in the Cursillo movement in New York, as well as in his parish. From waiting on tables to presiding, he did it all gladly. He was a devoted and supportive friend to many priests and many laypeople, Episcopal and Roman Catholic alike. To tell this story, I reached out to friends from those days. We shared memories of Kevin, who has been dead for some time now. Writing about him here has made me miss him, and has filled me with gratitude for having known him.

Though they broke his heart, the faculty at the seminary were right about Kevin's vocation: he would have been the wrong kind of priest, he used to say, if he had realized his dream early in life as he and everyone else had expected he would. He would have regarded ordination as the reward for his rigid adherence to doing things the one and only right way. It would have confirmed him in the belief that perfection was not only possible, it was obligatory. Imposing it upon himself, he would have imposed it on others. He would have become harsh and judgmental. He would have been too dutiful to explore his own sexuality because of his vow of celibacy, and it would have ridden him painfully throughout his ministry.

But, you know — that's not the only alternative scenario to what happened in real life. Kevin and I both could have been wrong about the kind of priest he would have been. Yes, he would have started out demanding perfection from himself and everyone else. But he wouldn't have gotten it — and maybe he would have changed his approach. He wouldn't have been the first young priest who needed to calm down a little. I look back on my own early years now, and see an arrogance that embarrasses me just thinking about it. Because I was academically strong, I was overconfident, certain that I knew what was right. I didn't fully appreciate the fact that there are fashions in ministry, that practices and approaches come in and out of vogue, so I accepted the truisms of the time as both universal and eternal truths, when none of them were either of those.

So Kevin never did become a priest. But he showed us all what a lay leader could be. Could we say, then, that this outcome was "meant to be"? That it was part of God's plan for Kevin? The older I get, the less confident I am in my ability to identify God's plan, and the less attracted I am to the idea that God maps out plans for us, the way a general draws up a battle plan. Rather, it seems to me that God offers possibilities at every turn, opportunities to help a new thing happen in the world. A cherished goal becomes suddenly and permanently out of reach-and life doesn't end. Now something else can happen. Maybe Kevin would have been a good priest. Maybe he wouldn't have. But neither of those possibilities were inevitable: they were possible. Lately I've been thinking that possible is one of my favorite words.

Whom did you tell first, when the possibility of your vocation first became clear to you? Do you remember when it was? For some people, it is a stunning moment of call they remember for the rest of their lives: the moment, the day, where they were, what they were doing. For most, though, it is a process. We come to it inch by inch, not all at once. It becomes possible, not certain. Whom did you tell? Someone who loved you? Maybe. But maybe not. Sometimes we don't go to family first with something that's going to change our lives — they want our lives to stay the same. Family often can't see us as something other than what we already are. Sometimes family is the last to know.

More often than not, the one to whom you entrust the news of your vocation is the one who inspired you to it in the first place, if that person is still around. Or someone else who now does that work. I think most of us have a string of such people, not just one; we gravitate toward those who inhabit already the fellowship we long to join. We meet as many of them as we can.

The people you admire weren't always the experienced elders they are now. They all were once as you are now-they were new. They didn't always know all they know now-they had to learn it, as everyone must. They remember what it was like not to know. Perhaps one of them sees something familiar in you. I was like that, he or she may remember, and there is a growing warmth to your interactions. When the time does come for you to tell someone what has been growing in your heart, this is the person you seek out. Do I have what it takes? Can you imagine me in this role? What should I do first?

Notice that I didn't say anything about Is God calling me to do this?

I cannot know what God is or is not doing. None of us can. I especially can't know this when what I am discerning involves my own passionate desire-human beings easily confuse our own desires with God's will. We also anthropomorphize God scandalously; we think God is just like us, only omnipotent-sort of like Superman. That God likes and desires things in the same way we do. We use language about God like the people in the Bible used, thinking that in doing so we are being faithful to the Scriptures, when what we are really doing is confining God to the thought processes of a particular time and place. We do not allow God to do new things, when the very essence of God is to create. God is the creator, not the replicator.

So I can't know if God is calling you to be a priest. Or to be a teacher or a waiter or a nurse or an engineer. All I can judge is whether or not you have the qualities I know to be useful in a calling, if it's one about which I am well-informed. Scornful of those less knowledgeable than you are? Probably not a teacher. Faint at the sight of blood? Something other than nursing, maybe. We can expect God to use what is already present to form us, and we can expect that God's call will probably not be a violation of who we are. It will be in line with who we are. The best indicator of a vocation may be that the people who know you aren't surprised when you tell them about it-they've already seen it in you.

And what they have seen is not just aptitude. Vocation is never only potential-it is actual. It is recognizable before it appears in full. Insofar as has been possible, you've already been exercising your vocation, even before you begin your formal training for it.

But, although your vocation won't be in violation of who you are, it could be in violation of who you think you are. We don't see ourselves as clearly as we imagine we do. I remember a young man who swore he would never become a priest. Anything but that. His father was one, and worked at night a lot. He would never do that to his family. Naturally, he went on to become a priest, and naturally, he found ways to be the father he wanted to be.

Sometimes the world sees the initial outline of your vocation before you do. Other times the part of the world you need to see it fails to do so. Sometimes this doesn't matter-you can just go forward anyway, on your own. But usually, it matters a great deal. In the church, for instance, there are gatekeepers, and they must agree with you that a vocation exists. In the church as Episcopalians have inherited it, discernment is a threefold action of the Holy Spirit: upon me, upon my community, and upon my bishop. It is not something we do as individuals-we do it together. Somehow, we must all agree that we are seeing the same thing in me, or we do not proceed.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Called by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 2017 Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

INTRODUCTION BEFORE I FORMED YOU IN THE WOMB, I KNEW YOU,
PART ONE: THE DREAM OF THE PRIEST,
1 The Dream of the Priest,
2 The Priest in the Desert,
3 The Dance of the Priest,
4 The Death of the Priest,
PART TWO: A PATH FORMED BY WALKING,
1 Writer,
2 Artist,
3 Teacher,
4 Doctor,
5 Waiter,
6 Actor,
7 Psychologist,
8 Lawyer,
9 Called to Just Pick Up and Leave,
10 The Call,