Abstract
I am currently in a high state of liminality. In less than a month as I write, I shall retire from Durham where I have been Dean since 2003. So my wife and I are between times. We are dismantling our home in this beautiful medieval Deanery and learning to inhabit a small Victorian end-of-terrace in the South Tyne Valley in Northumberland. We are saying goodbye to the incomparable Saxon and Norman stones of Durham Cathedral, and are getting ready to live close by even more ancient stones, Hadrian’s Wall just up the hill.
But before that, there is the small matter of the rites of passage we must undergo as we leave. Separation, the end of a chapter, the parting of friends need to be marked through shared rituals that help us navigate safely into a future we can’t yet know. This is as true for those who are left behind as it is for us who leave. These rituals are important in any family, community, or institution. We need to say ‘thank you’ and maybe ‘sorry’, and certainly wish one another well. In the church, these occasions are times for prayer, blessing, and commendation.
In Acts 20, Luke records at length Paul’s departure from Asia Minor. The Apostle summons the elders at Ephesus so that they can say farewell after his years of ministry there. Paul gives an account of how he has served among them, summing it up by quoting Jesus: ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’. And then Luke tells us how he left them. ‘When he had finished speaking, he knelt down with them all and prayed. There was much weeping among them all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, grieving especially because of what he had said, that they would not see him again. Then they brought him to the ship.’
They are poignant, these tears and embraces that no doubt left powerful memories as they lingered by the shore and watched Paul’s ship sail away. The story is told with tenderness and, if you will allow the phrase, emotional intelligence. It gives me permission not to fear but to welcome the part affect plays at times of heightened emotion such as I expect my final service to be. Descartes did not say Sentio ergo sum, ‘I feel, therefore I am’, but it’s surely as true of human life as his Cogito.
For me, this threshold of retirement doesn’t simply mean the end of twelve privileged years at Durham Cathedral. It marks the conclusion of forty years of full-time public ministry. Memories have become vivid of late: the places in which I have lived and worked, and especially their people and communities, those ‘angel faces I have loved long since and lost awhile’. Looking back entails regret and sadness as well as gratitude and celebration: ‘man was made for joy and woe’ said William Blake, in words friends embroidered on a precious sampler they made for our family at another leave-taking nearly thirty years ago.
So I am thinking hard about how I preach for the last time as I lay down a lifetime’s office as a stipendiary priest, how to do justice to the many layers that belong to saying goodbye. I dare say it will be work in progress until an hour before the service begins. But that is what life is: constantly being crafted and shaped by the God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’. In this divine company we negotiate life’s thresholds safely and with joy.