Spiritual living is all about setting things in right order. We must persistently and patiently clear away the dust and smudges that gather on the lenses through which we look at our lives. Then, it’s all about holding on tightly to the central threads that define what and who we are. I think back to all the many aspirations of my youth and how, so many twists and turns later, the story of my life emerges as one part plan and many parts happenstance.
The defining moments were events that seemed random at the time but that set in motion a whole range of changes. All those moments had another thing in common. They called on me to make a choice, to commit myself without reservation, and to take a leap of faith.
As I look back, what is interesting is that I made the most significant of those choices in an instant without much pondering or analysis.
- I met my wife as an undergraduate sophomore in a liberal arts college. I took Russian Art history, as did she but at the last moment after being closed out of another class she had hoped to take instead. We met in September. I proposed in November. We married in May. That was 35 years ago. I left school after marriage to work and support us. It was hard and the jobs not to my liking, but we were together, and that’s all that mattered. What governed all of our decisions was what we meant to each other. The vow was unconditional, and life-long. It was the necessary and right thing for us. It was somewhere written that we would grow older together and my good fortune is measured by a mutual love as constant as the Sun.
- Nine years into our marriage, our son was born: A wide-eyed child who came into the world looking astonished, curious, and thoughtful, as if surprised by the sudden change of scenery. At 26 years old now, he has a very active and incisive mind, and an abundant eagerness for life experience and adventure. He remains astonished, curious, and ever thoughtful. He asks challenging and probing questions and strives for intellectual honesty. I take great pleasure in our deep conversations, and I am very proud of the person he has become. Now he assumes his rightful place in the hero’s journey to uncover his special mission. In good and troubled times, I have stood at his side, having vowed to be a father that would always be there believing in his capacity for greatness without reservation. My love for him is the second great constant of my life.
- Nineteen years ago, our second child, our daughter, was born: An exuberant, passionate, affectionate, and adorable girl with eyes that shine with joyful expectation. She too is a lover of ideas, especially as they relate to the ways people and nature are connected, and how she can be a presence for good in bringing out those connections. She is a natural counselor and coach and will make a very fine therapist. She has uncommon empathy for other people, deep emotional intelligence for someone her age, and a warmth that is constant and fueled by a very large heart. She is all about being with people and her choices already have put her on a glide-path to making that the core of her professional life. She is the third precious element in my life.
- Beyond these three pillars, there are my sisters who hold very sizable claim on my heart and to whom I have also vowed to be a supportive presence. With beautiful families of their own, I remain a blessed older brother ever watchful and prayerful that they find joy and happiness.
As an outgrowth of these primary vows, I later said yes to a call to the Priesthood, and then the episcopacy. Taking these vows was more authentic by virtue of the ones that came before. The lifelong vow of the Priest is to commit to a radical doctrine of unconditional love and the continuous purging of the baser instincts and crude attachments, addictions, and preoccupations.
My choices led to non-traditional channels for priesthood and this is still an unfolding mystery. The one clear reality is that all these vows revolve around one primary quest, one central yearning, one powerful force opening up a path from among the innumerable possibilities. I do not know how the road will run from here, where it leads, nor how it will end, but I know it is mystically guided.
Beyond these principal people, there are, of course, many others, friends and relatives, colleagues and acquaintances, that have enriched my life beyond measure. Yet, all my choices are footnotes to those first powerful commitments. While the anchoring constants are those closest to me, defining who I am and what my life means, it’s a great paradox that solitude invariably reasserts itself.
My business and professional travels take me away from my home and wife. Having graduated, my son has now moved to South Korea for a year to teach and, at least physically, couldn’t be farther away. My daughter, a sophomore in college in the midwest, is pursuing her dreams and is now out of the house for most of the school year. This is as it should and must be, but everything is changing so fast. My wife and I now are rediscovering how to be a couple again, and this is the next phase in living the vow we took to one another so many years ago.
These are bitter-sweet times. They are hard. I think of my wife, son and daughter every day, wondering what they are doing, learning, and experiencing. It occurs to me that the joy of being close and the pain of being separated all amount to the same thing: recognition that the meaning of our lives is powerfully defined by those special, relatively few moments, where we make a choice and take a leap of faith. These are acts of courageous commitment rooted in a gut sense of the force of destiny.
I recall that the Aymara Indians of Central America have no personal pronoun nor a singular voice in their language. An Aymara married man, physically away from his wife, will answer the question: “Where is your wife?” by answering ” We are here.” In our language, the personal pronoun often injects distance between ourselves and those we “love”.
There are those who choose a more tentative and tempered life arrangement with pre-nuptial agreements and trial periods to test the waters. I see this hesitancy as affectional agnosticism. It is eros but often without agape. It is rational but potentially bloodless. There is no authentic and deep love without the great leap and the sonorous yes in the face of uncertainties and the inevitabley winding pathways of life.
Whether separated from those that mean so much to me or right there by their side, my life is forever defined in terms of what we mean to each other. Our thoughts in each other’s absence, and the energy we spend to keep the hearth burning and the lights lit is a constant beacon guiding them home. They stand as living testimony to the perpetual inner flame of true loving.
The Cosmic Beloved speaks to us in all of this. The hero’s journey demands firm choices, bold and gutsy vows, and an assertive, heart-felt march into the dark woods with frequent recollection of what it was that inspired that first “YES” and the will to cross the first threshold.
© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
The Harried Mystic 
What about those life changing moments/decisions that turn out to be dead ends, or worse, ones that become destructive. My husband is an ordained minister of the church of England; he was ordained aged 28, and as the years went on, became aware that the church he served was not where he needed to be. Three years ago, he left, retaining his orders but resigning his parishes and now seeks to find expression for his orders while working in the secular world. the world fell apart. That defining moment of ordination, became a mirage, a false step that leaves you in limbo, neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat. What then?
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Hi Viv. In my late 20s, I was a postulant for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church. It proved after several years to be the wrong church for me as well and I withdrew. It was over 15 years later that I discovered an independent catholic rite and was ordained in the mid-90s. This seemed a very sound expression of the faith with more of a mystical leaning, but several years after ordination, the community began to splinter succumbing ultimately to an unwholesome politics.
After that, i joined another independent rite and it was in the year 2000 that I was ordained to the episcopacy serving as Bishop Coadjutor for two years. But, once again, internal politics and egoistic power-grab decisions inconsistent with Canons convinced me that this community too was top heavy and blinded by agendas other than spiritual. It was at that point that I chose to be a wandering bishop, serving the Ekklesia from a vantage point outside of the major churches. It has been, for me, the right decision. As Abbot of the Order of the Christos, I have found a freedom to embrace a wholesome ecumenism in a smaller community eschewing the political machinations that overwhelm, it seems, all churches.
As a consulting psychologist, I formed my own consulting firm and serve client organizations and executives as a facilitator and coach. Of course, when the economy tanked in 2008, business suffered profoundly, but the overall course of my life has led to this place and its seems right. The whole process was not without a great deal of painful disappointment and dark days when I felt that I had been naive and mislead. I look back now realizing that at each turn the challenge was a test of my own convictions and integrity. It was a call to hard choices and the sacrifice of what I thought I needed and wanted. I discovered instead what I was really meant to do.
I would never presume to know the lessons implicit in someone else’s Call, but I can say that all that has happened opened me up to a simpler way and an expression of a different kind of priesthood: one more consistent actually with the model of the ancient church, the itinerant pastor ready to step into a wide range of circumstances in the service of the Kerygma. For a time, I gave it all up and went into a period of reflection and incubation. I came out lighter and more open to allowing surprising new possibilities to emerge.
I wish your husband all the best as he continues a transit that I know personally is a time of difficult emotional, intellectual, and spiritual turmoil. I am convinced that these events are meant to unfreeze our way of thinking and to allow deep conversion and transformation of vision and action.
Thank you for sharing it with me and your thoughts.
+ Br. Anthony
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Interesting.
I may pass this on to him to think about. Neither of us wishes a return, even to worship, to the churches as they are; we attend Quaker meeting at times. neither wishes to become embroiled again.
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Believe me, I do understand. My wife and I attended Quaker meeting for several years. I very much liked the zen-like quality of meeting and I had hoped that they would be appreciative of my vision of a marriage of forms. So, I had envisioned receiving ordination to a sacramental independent rite AND remain a Quaker attendee. That was not to be. Upon learning of my other involvement in a sacramental context, I was “visited” by a Quaker committee. The message was clear ( and terribly disappointing, once again): “You are either a Quaker or something else.” There is no end of in-group out-group politics among all established religious groups. Hence, my founding of the Order of the Christos: not a denomination, not a church, not a monastery and yet all of the above at the same time. The key is to keep power and money out of the equation.
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I agree.
I would have said that what you have set up is something my husband would be interested in, except for the fact that it is effectively a “virtual” order. While I (borne of loneliness and neccesity) am at home interacting at a deep level yet still using only the virtual world as my land of exploration, he is not as able to make the leap from face-to-face interaction (which he excelled at as a priest) to the less immediate and more cerebral(at times) means of communicating via the net.
He left primarily because of the issues of power and money and I still feel it was a tragedy. he is a good priest, the best I have ever known and now he has no context for it. We wait and see. I know the Quakers are only a resting point; we also couldn’t join because we do not fully accept the Peace testimony.
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I struggle with the virtuality as well, Viv. I want, more than anything else, a vibrant face-to-face community that gathers often. I have run retreats at a local Franciscan Friary of the Anglican Communion here. I am hopeful that the Order will grow to the level whereby like-minded seekers can gather for meditations, theological discussions, and worship. But, for now, the virtual appears to be the principal avenue of expression.
I am truly waiting on the Spirit as my guide. Thanks to Skype, virtual can mean face to face via video (not ideal but better than the lack of it altogether) and my work takes me all over the world, and, in those settings, I meet people who are connected as a loose network of associates.
As the Order does not seek membership per se, people are free to remain involved in their own chosen religious path while also becoming a part of the Order. My vision from the start was something simpler that has no growth or establishment agenda save authentic spiritual dialogue and shared discovery.
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Let me ask you a question that this conversation brought to mind–and I mean no disrespect by it whatsoever; it just reminds me of a conversation I had about Yeshua’s vision with the Rector of a church I used to attend (when I attended church), and of my own personal understanding: why seek “ordination” at all–even for “non-traditional channels” of priesthood, outside the traditional churches?
Thank you,
Nancy
http://saradode.wordpress.co
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Thank you for your good question, Nancy.
The answer lies in separating two aspects of church and priesthood: exoteric and esoteric. The exoteric, or outer church, is the one of place and set ritual, polity, and practice, Holy Days and ritual, and the public offices of the church. One who is ordained a Priest may then be asked to assume a public office, for example, rector, assistant pastor, relief priest, abbot of an Order of the church, chaplain, etc. So, exoterically, in non-traditional expressions, these roles may or may not apply depending upon how the ordained minister serves.
The esoteric face of Priesthood is another matter altogther, and it is in this sense that once ordained, one is a Priest forever, even though one may even be effectively unemployed in an offical capacity. Upon receiving the laying on of hands from a Bishop with intent to ordain, a charism is quickened. Mystically, higher spiritual potentialities are awakened by this special blessing. [Christain Kabbalah makes reference to the opening of another sefirot.]
In any event, in the esoteric sense, given preparation for receiving this sacrament, Priesthood, as blessing or charism, is awakened. Once ordained, it is then a matter of discernment and choice to interpret the Call to service, and that brings us back to the exoteric work of the Priest. For example, I serve as the Abbot of a “monastery without walls”. I was asked to assume this role by two bishops of the Church especially after my ordination to the episcopacy. For a time, I served “exoterically” as Dean of a seminary, then later as Bishop Coadjutor of an independent Catholic rite. I continue now as convening authority and abbot of a small community of seekers with pastoral work performing weddings, officiating at funerals, and as pastoral counselor.
I hope that gives you some further perspective on your very welcome and fair question. All the best to you and yours over this blessed Holiday Season.
+Anthony
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Thank you for your thoughtful and gracious reply, Anthony. I understand your distinction between the esoteric and exoteric functions of a member of the clergy, and I certainly understand your impulse toward the mystical aspects of ministry and apparently away from the ones that seem to inevitably involve politics, bureaucracy, etc. Certainly, without mysticism, or the openness of heart and mind to conceive of it, spirituality is like a dry bone. It’s something that seems to get lost.
I guess that my own feeling, influenced by my own interpretation of Yeshua’s mission and vision, is that much damage is done to people’s ability to have a personal relationship with the Divine by the perception that some kind of an “intermediary” is necessary–usually in the form of clergy. As soon as there is a sense that a structure and hierarchy (and I believe that Yeshua also taught that human-created hierarchies are false and often in direct opposition to the way God sees us) is “necessary”, the all-too-human impulse to “direct” or “correct” others’ understanding of the Divine gets a green light, and people are put into a position of wondering whether they are “worthy” of God’s love through the lens of other’s ideas. So I’m just leary of the “ordination” concept, I guess.
I also believe that “higher spiritual potentialities” begin to open as soon as one makes the decision to create a place in him/herself where the Divine can “live” and begin to work through the individual. Once one opens one’s eyes to the possibility of that kind of relationship, and decides to let love and compassion be one’s guiding priciples in all things, the potential for endless miracles (and the ability to recognize them as miracles) is there.
But I see that you are aware of the possible pitfalls, and your own vision of spirituality and of the priesthood sounds beautiful and creative and original, and full of potential. I’ll keep reading!
Blessings to you for the holiday season as well. I always think of the day after Thanksgiving as my go-ahead to start “living Christmas.” So today I’m feeling especially peaceful and excited…:)
Take care,
Nancy
http://saradode.wordpress.com
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Nancy,
You wrote “much damage is done to people’s ability to have a personal relationship with the Divine by the perception that some kind of an “intermediary” is necessary–usually in the form of clergy.” Beautifully and rightly said. The heart of Priesthood is not command or instruction, it’s facilitation and inquiry. It is not about relieving ( impossible) people of the burden of choice among options, moral dilemmas, and life’s complexities, it’s about spiritual friendship and serving as a catalyst for the answer to emerge from the heart of the person seeking the answers.
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“…it’s about spiritual friendship and serving as a catalyst for the answer to emerge from the heart of the person seeking the answers.”
The ideal :)…
Thanks, Anthony.
Nancy
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