Retirement as a Calling

      

     (My daughter at the Grand  Canyon.  The way I want to feel heading into retirement!)

After a three-year hiatus, it is time again to contemplate the meandering of my spirituality, and I hope you will share your spiritual meanderings with me.  

The word “calling” has several meanings within our Christian faith tradition, discussed in earlier blogs.  In summary, I think of the Call with a capital C as the general, overall sense and desire to listen to and attempt to follow the will of God in our lives.  Within that larger sense of Call, there are many different “callings,” which might include my vocation (pastor, teacher, custodian), my station within family (son, father, grandparent, sister), and my relationship to society (protestor, organizer, volunteer).  Furthermore, those callings may change from time to time, and how I go about them may change, because each calling is contextual.  First I was a son, then a husband, then a father.  I might be an organizer, but then decide it is time to be a protestor (or the other way around).  I might be a worshiper or Sunday School teacher, and then decide it is time to become a Council member, as Deacon of Education, or Social Ministry

As I wrote in earlier blogs, I don’t believe Martin Luther King, Jr. laid in bed as a youth and dreamed of being a civil rights leader. I am not so sure he even dreamed of being a pastor.  If he did, and he was like a lot of PK’s (Pastor’s Kid), that dream might have been a nightmare.  However, as I related in the blogs of 8/6/12, 8/9/12, and 9/6/12, his sense of call kept changing.

I hope you will share your own struggles and joys in trying to discern where the call of God is taking you right now, whether or not you have much clarity about that.  After all, like my good friend and spiritual director, Scott, likes to put it, “You can’t know the will of God ahead of time.”

As I head to official retirement from full-time parish ministry in a few months, I have been doing a lot of reflecting on what I might be called to in retirement.  I read a while back that it is easier to describe who a person is not rather than who a person is.  Well, I have a lot more clarity about what I don’t want my retirement to be than about what it might be.  

I don’t want it to be doing part-time what I have been doing full-time for 38 years, as many (maybe most) pastors do (not, as in the famous words of Jerry Seinfeld, there is anything wrong with it).  Nor (and this will surprise my pastor friend Tom ) do I plan to spent every waking hour watching sports, and going to Nats, Caps, and Wizards games (been there, done that).  Nor do I want to play golf 4 or 5 times a week, like by buddy in Phoenix, Steve.  (twice a week sounds about right). He, by the way, maintains 3 separate blogs, one that has a deadline every Saturday.  That is also not for me.  It feels a little too much like  . . . . . .

All my friends who have retired tell me they truly enjoy being released from the deadlines, conflicts, and stress that tend to be a part of our working lives.  In fact, one of my mentor pastors, when I asked him what he liked best about retirement, replied: “staying home.”

I have been blessed to have three sabbaticals over the years, all of which I spent at my cabin, with most of my focus on reading theology and spirituality, and writing about the insights I was receiving and the direction of my calling at that particular point in my life and ministry.

So now, once again, I am reflecting on where God might be leading me at this point in my spiritual journey.  And I see retirement as a truly marvelous gift—one that I don’t take for granted in any sense.  My Father died when he was 54, my Mother when she was 49, my first wife, Pauline, when she was 32, and my brother, Neil, (who, like me, retired when he was 65), at the age of 66.  

Now, moving from the question of what I won’t be doing to what I will be doing, a few pieces of the mosaic are in place.  My wife, Mary, a Montessori teacher, wants to teach three more years until she, too, hits Medicare age.  So I am going to pamper her, doing most of the cleaning, shopping, and cooking.  Most evenings she will arrive home to a fine meal served with fine wine.

I have three or four younger, pastor friends, who ask me to mentor them from time to time, and I feel blessed to be able to share some of what I have learned throughout the years.

Now, finally, I should have time to be a more active member of two of our synod teams, one which is working on immigration issues and the other on issues of racism.  I have also offered to continue to take groups, as I have been doing every year, to El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, to learn about border and immigration issues.  I will also keep working with our scholarship program for youth in Juarez.

And, of course, there will be some golf, lots of walking and working out, a few sporting events, some travel, and visiting family and friends around the country as I go on the road trips I love so much, including the ones by myself.

But there is still the one big, unknown piece.  It is the contextual one of where else God might be leading me right now.  That is usually the hardest piece to answer, and the easiest one to set aside.  I know from experience that I can only journey toward insights about that part of my journey if I keep reading, journaling, praying, reflecting, and sharing and discussing the elements of the journey with others who are also seeking.  I hope my new Facebook page and this blog can be a way of doing that, and I hope you will join me in this journey together. 

Like Anne Lamott, whom I read often, I love these words of Wendell Berry: “it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.  The mind that is not baffled is not employed.  The impeded stream is the one that sings.”  [quoted on p. 6 of Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace.]