What a priest does
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL HINDS JOHN GARVEY WHJif #* FHiESV HOES Little frustrations, humbling duties Becently I went through a period of deep frustration. I am a priest in a small but growing Orthodox...
...On my first visit he was puzzled and unhappy, but could talk about what happened...
...63 percent wanted to work as priests for as long as possible, and 60 percent of the retired clergy are still active at some level in pastoral work...
...The last time I saw him he had gone into himself...
...But a majority said they had no regrets about becoming priests...
...Almost half said that they had considered leaving parish ministry for some other form of ministry...
...Almost a third said they had regretted, at least at some point, the decision to become a priest...
...I told him what 1 was going to do, he nodded, and I anointed him and said the prayer for the departing of the soul...
...Then I visited a church member in the hospital, an old Albanian who only weeks before had been full of life...
...The next day was Sunday, and the epistle was Colossians: "For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God...
...One woman noticed how uncomfortable he was because he was unshaven, and tried to get someone to deal with that...
...When I was in my teens, a Catholic priest told me that he found hearing confessions an encouraging and moving part of his priesthood...
...Seeing someone dying puts all of this on the line...
...Suddenly he had difficulty eating, surgery was done, and it turned out he had a cancer that had metasticized nearly everywhere...
...He was still attentive to other people, but it was an Commonweal 8 January 15,1999 effort...
...You are, instead, able to watch grace at work in people's lives, and although that can and will take you to deeply sad places, it can also be deeply wonderful...
...When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory...
...She succeeded...
...When it goes well it is wonderful: people can know and help one another, bearing one another's burdens...
...That's a pretty healthy number...
...Their attention to him, their concern, moved me deeply...
...I am a priest in a small but growing Orthodox church in New York, and small churches have all the advantages and disadvantages of family, or life in a small town...
...He's in his eighties and has Parkinson's disease, but always had plenty of energy and liked to preside in his corner of the church hall during the coffee hour...
...The emphasis on the fact that baptism means our baptism into Christ's death, and the hope of his resurrection, is part of our faith...
...It is hard to see the glory to come, though the cross is certainly apparent...
...She's a beautiful woman...
...None of them are blood relatives (unusual in our parish, where many people are related), but all thought of him as someone who was somehow in the family, and they were right...
...Other people fed him, gave him water to drink, tried in every way to serve him...
...On my second visit he had grown much more gaunt, except for his distended stomach, and he was quieter, resigned, but still able to talk about a young couple he had befriended...
...The stuff that doesn't matter, or that involves you with confrontational members of the congregation, seems sometimes (it did at this time) to outweigh the things that do matter...
...A lot of people visited as my parishioner approached the end...
...The husband had brought him pictures of their newborn baby, and he told me, "They're a very nice couple...
...When you are caught in the middle of negative currents the dark side of all this can loom large, and make you wonder why you ever took this up in the first place...
...I was in a dark mood one week recently, and it was compounded by a particularly busy and pointless burst of work: a lot of what a priest does in a small community is wait for people who don't show up on time, or at all, to do things like fix the boiler or wax the floor, and there are meetings, sometimes contentious, of the church board, and mailings to get out, on top of the usual pastoral work...
...You aren't necessarily witnessing, in the sense of revealing something, yourself, though one sense might lead to the other...
...And everyone has a particular expectation of the priest who, if he tries to meet them all, will be doing something strange to himself and no doubt to the gospel...
...After my dark moment and an encounter with the more important level of what being part of a church community means, I see more of what it means to be a witness, and it is encouraging...
...And in some confessions you see someone truly struggling to live the life we have in Christ...
...or they can pay attention only to the failings of others, seeing none of their own, and judge one another harshly...
...When I touched him he opened his eyes and recognized me, but could only groan deeply...
...One interesting set of questions and answers had to do with how they felt about their work...
...I have seen this sort of thing before: people trying to get quarreling relatives to reconcile, for example, or someone wealthy who, without telling anyone, is of great help to a new immigrant family—I learned about his generosity from them, not from him...
...Seventy-nine percent of the retired clergy "feel a sense of gratitude" for their work as priests...
...You are stuck with your relatives and neighbors, and with the members of your congregation...
...I couldn't imagine why, then, but I understand now...
...Before a recent meeting of the clergy of the Orthodox Church in America a questionnaire was sent to priests...
Vol. 126 • January 1999 • No. 1
