The Rector’s Blog
The Great Train Journey
Blogging on the Road
This is a record of my sabbatical journey around the country, leaving St. James’ after Easter, and returning to the pulpit on July 11. First leg – Salt Lake City to California – has already begun.
Launching the Pilgrimage for the Third Conversion. I’ve stolen the title from a book review in the current Christian Century. But it seems like a good way to describe what is going on for me personally, and how I want to share that experience with my congregation. The question is, how to name conversions #1 and 2? Certainly a new beginning happened when I took my last drink on the Feast of St. Patrick 1986, or finally surrendered the Nyquil and futile tokes of hashish on Mother’s Day that same year. But certainly a first conversion was in the works long before, when I chose confirmation at age 12 (insofar as a twelve-year-old can make such a choie) or slammed the door on religion in my 20s, or peeped back in a decade later. And what about the conversion at age 40 when I met my beloved George, after I had so clearly given up hope of marriage and family? Or the time some years later when I confessed to him that we really did need to go ahead with seminary, that the life of a priest had been forming in me forever and we were going to have drop everything and go. What numbering system was there for that?
But certainly a new life has now begun. After seven years serving a congregation in Eastern Washington, on the border with the base of the Idaho Panhandle, a congregation that has nourished my call to priesthood as certainly as did my seminary in Berkeley, California — and after nursing my husband George through a series of operations and a final wasting disease – certainly it is time to ask, “Now what?”
And to ask it without fear, but without a preconceived notion of the final answer, I am setting out on a pilgrimage. For three months I will be traveling by plane and train, the occasional bus and possibly even a rented car. I will bring with me that portion of George’s ashes that have not been interred in our memorial garden at St. James, or distributed in memory vials to his four grown children. The remains will accompany me for the first part of the trip to Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Berkeley, Santa Barbara – and then across the southern United States to Florida. There I will meet George’s cousin Joanne, and we will commend his remains to the waters off the shores of Delray Beach, where he spent the fondest years of his life, snorkeling, goofing off, hanging with his friends as part of the Fab Four. That is Phase I. Stay tuned for the rest of the journey. We begin after Easter.
rivetti
January 25, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Well – my friend, you are missed already. Not that we are not in very capable hands – we are. I pray your journey to your third, fourth, and fifth conversions are well underway. God always has surprises, blessings that seem to “catch up to us, running from behind …” I look forward to more from you.
Love and great peace to you. Dianne
Dianne Lowe
April 12, 2010 at 5:47 pm
I seem to be posting on the wrong page. Look over at “About” for more updates. I’ll get this figured out eventually.
rivetti
April 13, 2010 at 4:17 pm